[HN Gopher] U.S. opens probe into Tesla's Autopilot over emergen...
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U.S. opens probe into Tesla's Autopilot over emergency vehicle
crashes
Author : etimberg
Score : 322 points
Date : 2021-08-16 12:43 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| hetspookjee wrote:
| I wonder how many accidents happened because people were fiddling
| with their screen to turn on the windscreen wipers and took their
| eyes of the road too long in poor sight. I can't believe the law
| allowed the controls for the wiper speed to be put into this
| capacitive screen.
| okareaman wrote:
| When I was learning to drive, my grandmother drilled into me to
| never swerve for an animal that jumps out in front of the car.
| This saved me when I was driving by the Grand Canyon and jack
| rabbits kept jumping, out of nowhere seemingly, in front of my
| car. I drilled "never swerve" into my son and it saved him on a
| mountain road when he hit a deer. He didn't go into the trees.
| When I drove in Alaska I asked why the forest was cut back from
| the road. They said that moose like to step out in front of cars.
|
| I have no idea how self-driving fits into this. I don't have a
| feel how self-driving responds to emergencies. I'd have to
| experience an emergency in one. For that reason, I don't see
| myself ever trusting self-driving.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| When my wife learned to drive in Norway she was instructed
| never to swerve to avoid a collision regardless of whether it
| was an elk, a dog or a human being in front of the car, just to
| stamp hard on the brake.
|
| The rationale being that swerving most likely puts more people
| at risk more of the time. Especially true here where leaving
| the road often means either colliding with the granite cliff
| wall or ending up in the fjord or lake.
| lawn wrote:
| It's always contextual. If you run into a moose head on, you're
| in for a very bad time.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| That's where the other three rules apply:
|
| 1. always pay full attention to where you are because there
| might be a truck or a family of 5 coming from the opposite
| direction, 2. never lift, 3. always look in the direction you
| want to travel in, not in the direction you currently travel
| leroman wrote:
| Seeing all the near-misses and life saving interventions on
| YouTube involving Tesla vehicles, 1 death seems not such a bad
| result..
|
| The question should be - how many lives were saved by this system
| vs how many would die if driven "normally"?
| thereisnospork wrote:
| >The question should be - how many lives were saved by this
| system vs how many would die if driven "normally"?
|
| It is also necessary to project this into the future, i.e.
| looking at the integral of expected lives lost 'rushing' self
| driving cars vs. 'waiting-and-seeing' (as Americans die at a
| rate of 40,000 per annum).
|
| If twice as many people die for a fixed number of years to
| create a self driving system that results in half the fatality
| rate of the status quo, that becomes worth it very, very
| quickly.
| young_unixer wrote:
| I don't think that should be the question.
|
| For example: it's not morally equivalent to die while drunk
| driving at 150 km/h vs dying as a pedestrian because someone
| ran over you.
|
| I would prefer 10 drunk drivers die instead of just one
| innocent person.
| leroman wrote:
| There's a place for a discussion about the moral
| repercussions, I doubt it's a 10 drunk driver vs 1 soccer mom
| situation ;)
| nickik wrote:
| The only person who died fell asleep in the car and would
| have died in any car as far as I remember.
| rvz wrote:
| Did I not just say this before? [0] [1] [2], seems like the
| safety probe formally agrees with my (and many other's) concerns
| over the deceptive advertising of the FSD package and its safety
| risks towards other drivers.
|
| Perhaps this is for the best.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996321
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27863941
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28053883
| nickik wrote:
| That is literally not what this is about.
| Animats wrote:
| Right. As I've pointed out previously, Tesla seems to be unable
| to detect sizable stationary obstacles that are partly blocking a
| lane, especially if they don't look like the rear end of a car.
| In addition to emergency vehicles, Teslas on autopilot have
| plowed into freeway barriers and a street sweeper. That's the
| usual situation for first responders, who usually try to block as
| little of the road as possible but often don't have enough
| shoulder space.
|
| It's clear what Tesla really has - a good lane follower and
| cruise control that slows down for cars ahead. That's a level 2
| system. That's useful, but, despite all the hype about "full self
| driving", it seems that's all they've got.
|
| "Full self driving" just adds some lane-changing assistance and
| hints from the nav system.
| asdff wrote:
| I don't understand how its even possible for these cars to be
| crashing. My car beeps like a missile is locked on when I am
| coming too close to an object I might hit. Just a simple sensor
| in the front. If my car can beep and give me enough time to
| slam on the brakes, why can't Tesla's do the same?
| quartesixte wrote:
| Well for starters, they're taking out the radars that other
| cars rely on to accomplish this.
| shrimpx wrote:
| In other parts of this thread, people are suggesting that
| these crashes are the _radar 's fault_ and deploying their
| vision-only system will fix the problem.
| HALtheWise wrote:
| You're probably referring to parking sensors, which are
| typically ultrasonic sensors mounted to the bumpers.
| Unfortunately, ultrasonics have both a limited range of ~20ft
| for practical uses, and more damningly, a relatively wide
| field of view with no ability to distinguish where in the
| field of view an object is. While 20ft range is more than
| enough to give you time to slam on the brakes in your garage,
| it's basically useless for high speed autonomy, except for
| some very limited blindspot-awareness type tasks.
| bit_logic wrote:
| I think we need to add a new level 2 assisted driving skills
| section to driving tests. Level 2 can be safer but it really
| requires understanding how level 2 works and limitations. For
| example, when I use level 2 (mine is Honda but applies to other
| level 2 as well since they mostly share the same vendor), these
| are the rules I follow:
|
| - Car switching in/out of my lane, I manually take over
|
| - Tight curve in the freeway, manually take over
|
| - Very frequently check the dashboard indicator that shows if
| the sensors "sees" the car front or not
|
| - Anything unusual like construction, cones, car on shoulder,
| manually take over
|
| - Anything that looks difficult like weird merging lanes,
| manually take over
|
| - Any bad weather or condition like sun directly in front,
| manual drive
|
| - Frequently adjusting max speed setting on ACC. It's safer to
| not be too much above the prevailing speeds. Otherwise, if ACC
| suddenly becomes blind, it can accelerate dangerously as it
| tries to reach max set speed.
|
| - I don't trust lane keep much, it's mostly a backup for my own
| steering and making my arms less tired turning the wheel
|
| The key thing is to recognize just how dumb this technology is.
| It's not smart, it's not AI. It's just a bit above the old
| cruise control. With that mindset it can be used safely.
| sunshineforever wrote:
| I think it's early to be adding stuff like that to government
| mandated driving tests when these cars are only theoretically
| available to the ever dwindling middle class and above.
| Unless my circumstances change there's no chance I'll be in
| one for at least 10-15 years.
| jumpkick wrote:
| If level 2 requires such handholding, what's the point? Seems
| to me like it just leads to a false sense of security, giving
| drivers the feeling that they can trust the self-driving
| system a lot more than they safely can.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Seems like it's easier just to drive regularly. This sounds
| very distracted
| mmcconnell1618 wrote:
| I wonder if some sort of standard display showing what the
| vehicle "sees" and is predicted to do will be regulated. For
| example, if the display shows the vehicle doesn't understand
| a firetruck parked half way in the lane or the tight curve on
| the freeway, at least the driver can validate on the display
| and have some time to react.
| sunshineforever wrote:
| I would strongly prefer a car with such features.
| ajross wrote:
| > Level 2 can be safer but [...]
|
| I think that requires more numerate analysis than you're
| giving though. The data from the story is a sample size of 11
| crashes over three years (I think). If that's really the size
| of the effect, then your "but [...]" clause seems very
| suspect.
|
| There are almost two million of these cars on the roads now.
| It seems extremely likely that the number of accidents
| _prevented_ by AP dwarfs this effect, so arguing against it
| even by implication as you do here seems likely to be doing
| more harm than good.
|
| That doesn't mean it's not worth investigating what seems
| like an identifiable edge case in the AP obstacle detection.
| But that's a bug fix, not an argument about "Level 2
| Autonomy" in general.
| qweqwweqwe-90i wrote:
| Yeah, let's ignore all the good and force everyone to go back
| to human drivers that are 10x worse.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Can you please stop repeating this tripe, it's been debunked
| over-and-over again, and it is really getting tiring.
| evanextreme wrote:
| No one is saying this should be the case, just that the
| feature is not what the company advertises (the ability for
| the car to fully drive itself) and that said feature is
| further away from completion than many might lead you to
| believe. as someone who drives a tesla with autopilot, I
| agree with this. Autopilot is the best lane assistance system
| ive used, but thats all it is.
| paxys wrote:
| Less than 100 first responders are hit annually in the USA.
| The fact that just Tesla has managed to hit 11 since 2018
| makes it pretty clear that human drivers are not "10x worse"
| than Tesla's tech, but quite the opposite.
| qweqwweqwe-90i wrote:
| You are comparing two different things. 11 responder
| vehicles crashes is not comparable to how many first
| responders (people) are hit.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Go back? Human drivers are _the norm_ , not the exception.
| This argument is tiresome beyond belief.
|
| But no, just keep disregarding the clearly _significant_
| issues and mis-marketing, because progress, right?
| thebruce87m wrote:
| There is no independent data to support your 10X claim. Tesla
| marketing or an Elon tweet doesn't count.
| clifdweller wrote:
| the point isn't to ignore it but to make sure everyone using
| it is 100% aware they need to be paying attention as this is
| a edge case that is common that the system cant handle so
| drivers are still responsible to take over
| kube-system wrote:
| Tesla does not offer a vehicle that does not require human
| drivers (not even momentarily). Tesla's autopilot and FSD
| systems are both SAE Level 2, which means the human is still
| in operation of the vehicle _at all times_. _All_ of Tesla 's
| driving assistance technologies require a human to monitor
| operation of the vehicle and intervene if necessary. The fact
| that they have given anyone an impression otherwise is
| problematic.
|
| https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/gallery/cm/articles/pre.
| ..
| ajross wrote:
| > The fact that they have given anyone an impression
| otherwise is problematic.
|
| Good grief. This meme will not die. The car literally tells
| you to keep your hands on the wheel every time you engage
| autopilot, yells at you if you don't, will lock you out of
| the system as punishment if you don't comply, and if you
| really seem disabled will bring the car to a stop and turn
| the hazards on. It _simply will not operate_ without an
| attentive driver, or at the very least one spending
| considerable energy at defeating the attention nags.
|
| There are exactly zero Tesla drivers in the world who don't
| know these rules. Just stop with the nonsense. Please.
| vkou wrote:
| > There are exactly zero Tesla drivers in the world who
| don't know these rules. Just stop with the nonsense.
| Please.
|
| Tesla's marketing also knows that there are exactly zero
| drivers in the world who follow those rules, but that
| doesn't stop them from overselling the capabilities of
| what they ship.
| ajross wrote:
| Stop it. Please. Again, there are no Tesla drivers who
| have been misled about the capabilities of the system.
| The people who have been mislead are folks like you who
| read arguments on the internet and don't drive these
| cars. Go try one and see how the system works. It doesn't
| permit the kind of confusion that everyone constantly
| assumes. It just doesn't.
| shrimpx wrote:
| Elon keeps warning the world about the impending
| hyperintelligent AI that will retool human economies, politics,
| and religions, yet year after year his cobbled-together AI
| fails at basic object detection.
| president wrote:
| It's all marketing and image projection.
| postmeta wrote:
| As this reddit post pointed out, this appears to be a common
| problem with radar TACC.
| https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/p5ekci/us_agen...
|
| """ These events occur typically when a vehicle is partially in
| a lane and radar has to ignore a stationary object. This is
| pretty standard and inherent with TACC + radar.
|
| The faster Tesla pushes the vision only stack to all cars after
| they've validated the data, the faster this topic becomes moot.
| Andrej Karpathy talks and shows examples of what that would do
| here. Minutes 23:00-28:00 https://youtu.be/a510m7s_SVI
|
| Older examples from manuals of other TACC systems which use
| radar:
|
| Volvo's Pilot Assist regarding AEB/TACC.
|
| According to Wired, Volvo's Pilot Assist system is much the
| same. The vehicles' manual explains that not only will the car
| fail to brake for a sudden stationary object, it may actually
| race toward it to regain its set speed:
|
| "Pilot Assist will ignore the stationary vehicle and instead
| accelerate to the stored speed. The driver must then intervene
| and apply the brakes."
|
| Cadillac Super Cruise - Page 252
|
| Stationary or Very Slow-Moving Objects
|
| ACC may not detect and react to stopped or slow-moving vehicles
| ahead of you. For example, the system may not brake for a
| vehicle it has never detected moving. This can occur in stop-
| and-go traffic or when a vehicle suddenly appears due to a
| vehicle ahead changing lanes. Your vehicle may not stop and
| could cause a crash. Use caution when using ACC. Your complete
| attention is always required while driving and you should be
| ready to take action and apply the brakes.
|
| BMW Driving Assistant Plus - Page 124
|
| A warning may not be issued when approaching a stationary or
| very slow-moving obstacle. You must react yourself; otherwise,
| there is the danger of an accident occurring.
|
| If a vehicle ahead of you unexpectedly moves into another lane
| from behind a stopped vehicle, you yourself must react, as the
| system does not react to stopped vehicles. """
| ajross wrote:
| FWIW: Tesla AP is primarily vision based now. Newer cars in
| the US aren't even being fitted out with the radar units
| anymore (mine doesn't have it, for instance). So while this
| may in some sense be an unavoidable edge case for radar, it
| really _shouldn 't_ be for Tesla Autopilot.
|
| It's worth checking out for sure. Not worth the headline
| bandwidth and flamage budget being spent on it.
| pkulak wrote:
| I'll believe it when I see it. From what I can tell, Tesla
| has made no progress at all in three years. I just drove my
| buddy's 3, and it was still diving to the right when a lane
| merges and the line disappears. This drove me nuts when I
| test drove years ago. Other cars do lane keeping so much
| better than Tesla at this point.
| sjg007 wrote:
| What about Subaru eyesight? I thought it did..
| Loughla wrote:
| Subaru's eyesight absolutely will stop you when you think
| you're about to hit something, regardless of whether or not
| that something was moving previously.
|
| It's actually really annoying if you live in a rural area
| without clearly defined lanes, and large, stationary
| objects (tractors and whatnot) close to the road.
| nzrf wrote:
| As I think I previously posted about this. It will also
| see exhaust coming up on cold winter day as an obstacle
| and brake unexpectedly at light. It literally is worst
| and wish it could be disabled by default.
|
| Additionally, the back up sensor is a tad over zealous
| also.
| icelandicmoss wrote:
| I feel like part of the problem with the kind of autopilot
| crashes you describe here is how _inexplicable_ they are to
| humans. Whilst humans can be dangerous drivers, the incidents
| they cause generally have a narrative sequence of events that
| are comprehensible to us -- for instance, driver was
| distracted, or visibility was poor.
|
| But when a supposedly 'all-seeing always watching' autopilot
| drives straight into a large stationary object in clear
| daylight, we have no understanding of how the situation
| occurred.
|
| This I think has a couple of effects:
|
| 1) The apparent randomness makes the idea of these crashes a
| lot more scary -- psychologically we seem to have a greater
| aversion to danger we can't predict, and we can't tell
| ourselves the 'ah but that wouldn't happen to me' story.
|
| 2) Predictability of road incidents actually is a relevant
| piece of information. As a road user (including pedestrian),
| most of my actions are taken on the basis of what I am
| _expecting_ to happen next, and my model for this is how humans
| drive (and walk). Automated drivers have different
| characteristics and failure modes, and that makes them an
| interaction problem for me.
| oaw-bct-ar-bamf wrote:
| In my opinion the underlying assumption autopilots are built
| with are wrong. It is assumed that the road is free to drive
| on.
|
| Only when the vehicle computer detects a known object on the
| road that it knows should not be there it is applying brakes
| or trying to steer around.
|
| I would feel safer if the algorithm would assume the negative
| case as default and only give the ,,green light" once it
| determined that the road is free to drive on. In case of
| unknown (not yet supervised) road obstructions the worst
| needs to be assumed.
|
| That's where the ,unexplainable' crashes are coming from.
| Something the size of an actual truck is obstructing the
| road. But couldn't quite classify it because the truck has
| tipped over and is lying on the road sideways. Not yet
| learned by the algorithm. Can't be that bad, green light, no
| need to avoid or brake.
| [deleted]
| quartesixte wrote:
| > It is assumed that the road is free to drive on.
|
| Trying to remember if the opposite of this is how human
| drivers are taught, or if this is implicit in how we move
| about the world. My initial gut reaction says yes and this
| is a great phrasing of something that was always bothering
| me about automated driving.
|
| Perhaps we should model our autopilots after horses:
| refusal to move against anything unfamiliar, and biased
| towards going back home on familiar routes.
| willcipriano wrote:
| I agree. In the north east at least pothole avoidance is a
| critically important skill. Any "autopilot" without it
| would be fairly useless around me as I'd have to take over
| every 30 seconds to not end up with a flat tire. I have
| adaptive cruse control and that's about as far as I'll
| trust a computer to drive given the current tech.
| nikkinana wrote:
| Shake 'em down, shut that shit down. Non union fuckers.
| jedberg wrote:
| A lot of people in here saying it is not possible to drive safely
| with partial self driving. I wonder, how many of those people
| have actually driven a car with autopilot?
|
| I have autopilot on my car, and it definitely makes me a better
| and safer driver. It maintains my distance from the car in front
| and my speed while keeping me in my lane, so my brain no longer
| has to worry about those mundane things. Instead I can spend all
| my brainpower focused on looking for potential emergencies,
| instead of splitting time between lane keeping/following and
| looking for emergencies.
|
| I no longer have to look at my speedometer or the lane markers, I
| can take a much broader view of the traffic and conditions around
| me.
|
| Before you say it's impossible to be safe driving with an
| assistive product, I suggest trying one out.
| yumraj wrote:
| It is possible that you've learnt to drive like that and that
| it works for you.
|
| But, I feel that this depends on the type of driver and their
| personality. I, for on, have never felt comfortable with cruise
| controls, even adaptive ones, let alone partial self-driving. I
| had always found that I am more comfortable when I was driving
| rather than trying to make sure that the adaptive cruise
| control is able to make a complete stop in case of emergencies.
| Perhaps I'm just a little untrusting and paranoid :).
| new_realist wrote:
| As someone who has used Autopilot extensively, I can tell you:
| you only have the illusion of enhanced safety. In reality,
| parts of your brain have shut down to save energy, and you've
| lost some situational awareness, but you can't tell that's
| happened.
| e40 wrote:
| For you, definitely. For the people I see reading while the car
| drives them, not at all.
| asdff wrote:
| I think that's pretty reckless honestly, you put a lot of faith
| in the system being able to detect lane markers. Other than
| that I could see how adaptive cruise control can be nice, but
| it's also not hard to engage cruise control and fine tune your
| speed to the conditions by tapping up or down on the buttons on
| the wheel.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > "* It maintains my distance from the car in front and my
| speed while keeping me in my lane, so my brain no longer has to
| worry about those mundane things.*"
|
| Ive been driving for 25 years, cars, trucks, trailers, standard
| and auto transmissions, and I have never once thought to myself
| "I'd be such a better diver if I didn't have to pay attention
| to my speed, lane keeping or following distance" Why? Because
| those mundane things are already on autopilot in my brain.
|
| Posts like yours are so absurd to met that I cant help but
| think shill.
| jedberg wrote:
| I've been driving for 29 years, and I never thought those
| things either until I got autopilot (and I don't have a Tesla
| BTW, I have a different autopilot system). While those things
| were autopilot in my brain, they still took brain power. It's
| so much more relaxing not worrying about those things.
|
| It's like people who do math by hand and then get a
| calculator.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Maybe you're a great driver then. Have you ever shared the
| road with someone who was a terrible driver?
| studentrob wrote:
| Yes. Those are people who think they can go hands free, use
| their phone or watch a movie while on autopilot.
| sorokod wrote:
| Survivorship bias?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| That would only be relevant is a substantial portion of
| people who felt poorly about tesla autopilot had literally
| perished from it.
| sorokod wrote:
| It was said in jest, but to your comment, no need to perish
| - just not be vocal about the negative feelings.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > my brain no longer has to worry about those mundane things
|
| I would be terrified to share the road with someone of this
| mindset. Your vehicle is a lethal weapon when you are driving
| it around (assisted or otherwise). At no point can someone
| claim that a tesla vehicle circa today is able to completely
| assume the duty of driving. You are still 100% responsible for
| everything that happens in and around that car. You had better
| have a plan for what happens if autopilot decides to shit the
| bed while a semi jackknifes in front of you.
|
| The exceptions are what will kill you - and others - every
| single time. It's not the boring daily drives where 50 car
| pileups and random battery explosions occur. Maybe your risk
| tolerance is higher. Mine is not. Please consider this next
| time you are on the road.
| jedberg wrote:
| Do you get concerned about mathematical errors because the
| computer is doing the calculation instead of someone doing it
| by hand?
|
| It's the same thing here. The computer is _assisting_ me so
| that I can take care of the novel situations, the exceptions
| if you will. I can pay closer attention to the road and see
| that jackknifed trailer sooner because I wasn 't looking at
| my speedometer to check my speed.
|
| And I don't have a Tesla, I use a different autopilot system.
| nexuist wrote:
| This...is entirely the point OP is making. You get more brain
| power to watch out for the semi jackknifing into you, the car
| switching lanes without signaling, the truck about to lose a
| bucket or chair from its bed. This is stuff you may not catch
| when you're spending your brain power focusing on staying
| between the lanes and keeping your distance between the car
| in front.
|
| When you automate away the mundane, exceptions are much
| easier to catch.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Agreed. I have a rudimentary radar enhanced cruise control in
| my minivan and I've found it's really helpful for maintaining a
| safe stopping distance while driving.
| tomdell wrote:
| I would argue that partial self driving is an irresponsible
| product not because it's impossible to drive safely with it,
| but because so many people will use it as an excuse to pay
| little to no attention to the road. If you personally are a
| responsible driver and even a better driver with it, that's
| great - but most people probably aren't going to use it the
| same way, especially those without much of an understanding of
| the technology - and especially given the way that Tesla
| markets it.
| joshuanapoli wrote:
| > so many people will use it as an excuse to pay little to no
| attention to the road
|
| I guess that we have to look at the results here to judge
| whether too many people are not paying attention. Hopefully
| the investigation will reveal whether the autopilot incidents
| of collision with emergency vehicles is significantly more
| frequent or less frequent than from vehicles being driven in
| the traditional way.
| samstave wrote:
| One would think that with "autopilot" there would be a limit
| to speed and an increased "caution distance" the vehicle
| maintains with everything.
|
| I also think there should be dedicated lanes for self driving
| cars..
|
| A very good friend of mine was a sensor engineer at google
| working on virtual sensors that interacted with hand gestures
| in the air... and is now a pre-eminent sensor engineer for a
| large japanese company everyone has heard of...
|
| We drove from the bay to nprthern california in his tesla and
| it was terrifying how much trust he put into that car. I got
| car sick and ended up throwing up out the window...
|
| Knowing what I know of machines working in tech since 1995 --
| I would trust SHIT for self-driving just yet.
| birken wrote:
| Absolutely not true as a blanket statement. Maybe if the
| driver monitoring is so lax that you could conceivably trick
| the car into poorly driving itself, but the system I use,
| Comma [1], has incredibly strict driver monitoring.
|
| There is absolutely no doubt I'm a safer driver with Comma
| than without it. I'm still in control, but Comma not only
| allows me to expend less effort driving (which allows me to
| stay alert over longer periods of time), but also be much
| less emotional when driving. I'm pretty convinced that a
| large percentage of accidents are caused by frustrated or
| bored drivers doing crazy things that you just don't feel the
| urge to do with the assistance of self-driving.
|
| 1: https://comma.ai/
| jedberg wrote:
| I use the same system as you do, and I've noticed that if
| you mention that system's name, you tend to get downvotes.
| I haven't yet figured out why, not sure if there is a bot
| or just a lot of Tesla fans who downvote the mention of our
| system.
|
| Edit: After one minute I got a downvote.
| SECProto wrote:
| It sounds like you're advertising it. "The future can be
| yours, today. For the introductory monthly price of
| 79.99. Sign up here[1]"
| jedberg wrote:
| This doesn't even make sense. Simply mentioning the name
| of a product I use is not advertising. Otherwise, is
| every person here who mentions Tesla advertising too?
| woah wrote:
| I once talked to a guy who bragged about having Autopilot
| drive him home when he's drunk
| jskrn wrote:
| Well said, that last bit especially. The regulations on
| medical devices are on how the manufacturer markets it.
| Should be the same for driving technology.
| Drunk_Engineer wrote:
| The technical term for this is Risk Compensation:
|
| "Risk compensation is a theory which suggests that people
| typically adjust their behavior in response to perceived
| levels of risk, becoming more careful where they sense
| greater risk and less careful if they feel more protected."
| xahrepap wrote:
| Reminds me of this kind of thing:
|
| https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/09/13/wide-residential-
| stre...
|
| I was first introduced to "wide streets in neighborhoods
| are more dangerous than narrow" on HN years ago. (I don't
| think it was the linked article, but that was the first one
| that came up just now after a search :P )
|
| Since having read that, I've actually noticed how true this
| is, at least to me anecdotally. When I'm driving in a
| neighborhood with crowded streets, I can't bring myself to
| go over 15MPH, much less over the speed limit (typically 25
| in neighborhoods in the US).
|
| Wide streets give a sense of security. So I feel like
| people are less likely to pay attention going around bends,
| parked cars, etc, than if they didn't have that sense of
| security.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Also moral hazard, kinda.
| wilg wrote:
| This is a question that is answerable with the right data -
| we can just see if it's safer or not.
| malwarebytess wrote:
| Doesn't the data show that cars with assistive technologies
| are in fewer non-fatal and fatal accidents?
| new_realist wrote:
| Tesla marketed Autopilot != responsibly implemented
| assistive safety systems.
| tomdell wrote:
| It looks like the federal government is beginning to
| collect and analyze relevant data, which will be
| interesting.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-06-29/nhtsa-
| adas...
|
| Tesla released data in the past, but that's quite suspect
| as they have an obvious agenda and aren't known for open
| and honest communication.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-
| safety...
| kemiller wrote:
| Yes there have been stories about irresponsible people. Do
| you have any evidence that this is the common case? The
| aggregate evidence seems to suggest reduced accidents and
| reduced fatalities.
| gusgus01 wrote:
| There was a study that adaptive cruise control and lane
| assist leads to more people speeding:
| https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/adaptive-cruise-control-
| spu...
|
| They then use a "common formula" to show that that leads to
| more fatal accidents, but didn't actually study on actual
| crash data.
| rubicon33 wrote:
| Something tells me the majority of people with partial self
| driving aren't using it as a means of staying more focussed on
| the road. There's a pesky little device buzzing around in
| everyone's pocket that is more likely the recipient of this
| newfound attention.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| There's not a small part of your psyche that tells you it's ok
| to drive while tired, or all the way home from that Las Vegas
| trip because the technology is so good?
| jedberg wrote:
| The thing is, I get a lot less tired when I'm driving now,
| because I get to focus only on the novel stimulus (possible
| emergencies) and not the mundane.
|
| But no, I don't trust it to drive itself. If I'm tired I
| won't drive, regardless of autopilot.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Thats not what they bloody sell it as, though. Thats the key.
| sgustard wrote:
| I agree 100% with jedberg as to my own driving experience with
| autopilot. Works great, and I still pay complete attention
| because I don't want to die in a fiery crash. If you're not
| going to pay attention, driving a dumber car doesn't make it
| safer.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| I tried it and found I was spending brainpower fighting the
| system, sending noise inputs wrt real world conditions in order
| to trick the system into not disengaging because it decided I
| was not "driving" it enough. The hacker in meet loved it, the
| rational person in me said, turn that off before it makes you
| crash!
| andyxor wrote:
| i've rented model X with the latest FSD a few weeks ago and
| even simple things like lane detection are very inconsistent
| and unpredictable.
|
| I don't know if this "AI" has any sort of quality control, but
| how difficult is it to test if it detects a solid white line on
| the side of the road in at least 6 out of 10 tries
|
| it also tends to suddenly disengage and pass control to the
| driver at most dangerous parts of the trip e.g. when passing
| other car in narrow lane, etc.
|
| This "driver assistant" is a series of disasters in the making.
| int_19h wrote:
| I have a car that does those things as well, and I use it a
| lot... but it's not Tesla, and its manufacturer doesn't refer
| to it "autopilot" or "self driving", but rather "advanced
| cruise control".
| aguasfrias wrote:
| You might be giving too much credit to your ability to pay
| attention to your surroundings. It is possible that looking
| around as a passenger might actually increases risk. There's no
| way to tell other than looking at the data.
|
| Personally, I tend to turn off things like lane keeping because
| I end up having to babysit them more than I would like. It
| doesn't always read the lanes correctly, though I have not
| tried Tesla's technology yet.
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| I drove a friend's Model 3, and within five minutes of driving
| on autopilot it got confused at an intersection and tried to
| make a pretty sudden 'lane change' to the wrong side of a
| divided road.
|
| Obviously that's a single anecdote, and I don't know if it
| would have gone through with it because I immediately
| corrected, but that was my experience.
| ec109685 wrote:
| I bet it would have made that mistake.
|
| The question is whether a system that absolutely requires
| that you pay attention going through intersections (which you
| should obviously do) is safer in aggregate than not having
| those features enabled at all in those situations.
|
| E.g. are weird lane changes that people don't catch happening
| more frequently than people zooming through red lights
| because they weren't paying attention. Only the data can show
| that, and Tesla _should_ share it.
| t0rt01se wrote:
| About time some adults got involved.
| myko wrote:
| I don't know how Tesla ever presumes to achieve FSD when they
| cannot detect stopped objects in the road, especially emergency
| vehicles. This is incredibly disappointing.
|
| Does anyone know if the FSD Beta has this ability?
| _ph_ wrote:
| All these crashes happened with the radar-controlled auto
| pilot. A radar system basically cannot detect static
| obstactles, as it doesn't have the spacial resolution to
| distinguish an obstacle in your lane from something right
| beside or above it (bridges). They can only use the radar to
| follow other cars, because these are not stationary objects.
|
| Recently, Tesla switched from radar-based to pure optical
| obstacle recognition. This should vastly improve this kind of
| behavior. Ironically that the investigation starts at a moment
| when they basically got rid of the old system.
|
| Look on youtube for videos of the FSD beta. It is amazingly
| good at recognizing the surroundings of a car, including parked
| vehicles at the road side.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > cannot detect stopped objects in the road,
|
| Neither can Volvo or VW.
|
| Actually my 2015 Ap1.5 Model S does detect stopped vehicles,
| unfortunately not reliably.
| guerby wrote:
| There is about 36000 death on the road per year in the USA for
| 280 millions vehicles, that's 128.5 death/million vehicule/year
|
| If we assume the number of tesla autopilot death double this year
| to 8 (from 4 at the time of probe launch), for about 900 thousand
| tesla on the road in USA, that's 8.9 autopilot death/million
| tesla/year.
|
| Ratio between the numbers of 14.4.
|
| Tesla reporting says for Q1 2021 one crash on autopilot per 4.19
| millions miles vs one crash per 484 thousand miles all vehicules.
|
| Ratio between the numbers of 8.7
|
| All numbers are full of biases and their ratio probably aren't
| that meaningful but they end up in the same magnitude.
|
| Interesting data there "Fatality Facts 2019 Urban/rural
| comparison":
|
| https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/urban...
|
| "Although 19 percent of people in the U.S. live in rural areas
| and 30 percent of the vehicle miles traveled occur in rural
| areas, almost half of crash deaths occur there. "
|
| I was shocked that in the USA in 2019 about 40-46% of all road
| death people were unbelted, while 90% of front seat people wear
| seat belts according to observation studies.
|
| Incidentally tesla car will beep to no end if weight is detected
| on a seat and seat belt isn't clicked: I have to click the seat
| belt when I put my (not so heavy) bag on the passenger seat since
| there's no software option to disable the beeping.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| My issue with comparing these statistics is that on the highway
| I see no shortage of reckless driving: speeding 20 over,
| weaving traffic, etc. Subtract this population (maybe by taking
| away their license and building public transit for them) and
| what do the numbers look like? Your seat belt stat supports
| this, a lot of drivers aren't even trying not to die.
|
| Of course, highway driving is the least dangerous (per
| passenger mile) since everything is so predictable, I don't
| know how many deaths are caused by t-bones at intersections but
| that at least should disappear now that auto-radar brakes are a
| thing... (tesla thinks it's too good for radar of course, even
| tho it can't recognize a god damn fire truck is in the way)
| jeffbee wrote:
| You can't really make the comparison between the entire US
| fleet and Tesla alone. All Teslas are newer than the median car
| in the fleet, and Tesla owners are self-selected among wealthy
| people, because the cars are pretty expensive. The IIHS says
| that deaths per million vehicle-years among midsize luxury cars
| is 20. There are many cars where no driver died in a given
| year, for example the Mercedes C-class "4matic" sedan .
| akira2501 wrote:
| > If we assume
|
| You shouldn't. 16% of accidents are pedestrians. 8% are
| motorcyclists. 40% of accidents involve excessive speed or
| drugs and alcohol.
|
| Accidents aren't a fungible item you can do this with.
|
| > bag on the passenger seat since there's no software option to
| disable the beeping.
|
| There is in the US for the rear seats. Additionally, you can
| just leave the belt always clicked in and just sit on top of
| them. There aren't many great technological solutions to human
| behavior.
| btbuildem wrote:
| > I was shocked that in the USA in 2019 about 40-46% of all
| road death people were unbelted, while 90% of front seat people
| wear seat belts according to observation studies.
|
| Doesn't that just speak to the effectiveness of seatbelts? Most
| people wear them, and two-fifths of those who died in a crash
| did not wear a seatbelt.
|
| If we had the same proportion of deaths as we have seatbelt
| wearers, that would indicate the belts are ineffective.
| guerby wrote:
| Yes we agree.
|
| It's just that in France "only" 20-25% of fatalities are for
| people not wearing seatbelt.
|
| Observation statistics are at about 98-99% of front seat
| users wearing seat belt in France.
|
| Seat belt in front is mandatory since 1st july 1973 and back
| seat since 1st october 1990.
|
| So seat belts not Tesla autopilot or whatever would save
| around 8000 lives per year in the USA.
|
| Are tesla cars in the USA nagging about seat belt with no
| software off switch like in France?
| zzt123 wrote:
| Assuming that belted and unbelted people get into accidents
| at the same rate, and given another commenter mentioning that
| Autopilot users have 8.7x lower accident rate than baseline,
| that makes Autopilot a greater safety add than seat belts,
| no?
| foepys wrote:
| Can Autopilot work in heavy rain or fog? If not, those
| comparisons are useless. Those are the conditions where
| most accidents occur, not in sunny Californian weather.
| guerby wrote:
| Yes up to a point where it gives up and asks the driver
| to take back the wheel.
|
| But at this point you really see nothing and you'll limit
| your speed to 10-40 km/h by yourself.
|
| I used it in those situation on my tesla model 3 to be
| able to focus a maximum on the small visibility left as a
| driver, and with both hands strongly on the wheel and
| foot on the brake, low visibility is really dangerous and
| scary on the road.
|
| Part of the issue is that you don't know what speed the
| car arriving behind you will have so where's your optimum
| speed? Too slow and rear ended by bad drivers, too fast
| and it won't go well.
|
| It's fresh on my mind since I had such driving conditions
| two weeks ago on the highway. Trucks stayed at suicidal
| 90 km/h ...
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Two notes:
|
| 1. generally speaking the right way to think about
| accidents/fatalities/hard breaking events is per miles driven
| given that risk scales with time spent on road (and miles
| driven is the best proxy we have at the moment, insurance
| companies use this stat)
|
| 2. If wearing a seat belt prevents a ton of fatalities as
| advertised and generally proven, it would make sense that of
| the road fatalities that do happen, many are due to not wearing
| a seat belt.
|
| 10% of people not wearing seat belts is still hundreds of
| millions of miles driven without seat belts.
| supperburg wrote:
| The Tesla FSD beta is what we all dreamed of in the 90s. It's
| mind blowing. Its so crazy that it's finally arrived, though not
| able to fully and reliably drive itself in every circumstance,
| and nobody seems to care. People only seem to be foaming at the
| mouth about the way way the product is labeled. If HN found the
| holy grail but it was labeled "un-holy grail" then HN would
| apparently chuck it over their shoulder.
| [deleted]
| antattack wrote:
| NHTSA is lumping TACC with Autopilot to increase number of
| incidents and make the case sound more serious:
|
| "The involved subject vehicles were all confirmed to have been
| engaged in either Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control
| during the approach to the crashes," NHTSA said in a document
| opening the investigation.
|
| TACC is very different from Autopilot.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| NHTSA reports are usually very neutral. I'd be very surprised
| if they were out to get Tesla, or really any other corporation
| or individual.
| antattack wrote:
| Every car with adaptive cruise has similar disclaimer,
| pointing how unreliable system is recognizing parked vehicles
| [1]:
|
| Safety Consideration When Using Adaptive Cruise Control
|
| * The system can only brake so much. Your complete attention
| is always required while driving.
|
| * Adaptive Cruise Control does not steer your vehicle. You
| must always be in control of vehicle steering.
|
| * The system may not react to parked, stopped or slow-moving
| vehicles. You should always be ready to take action and apply
| the brakes.
|
| [1]https://my.gmc.com/how-to-support/driving-
| performance/drivin...
| literallyaduck wrote:
| I believe we should have safety probes. Lots of people who have
| taken money from the auto industry want this specifically for
| Tesla. There is a strong possibility this is political punishment
| for wrongthink.
| tmountain wrote:
| > In one of the cases, a doctor was watching a movie on a phone
| when his vehicle rammed into a state trooper in North Carolina.
|
| Doesn't autopilot require you to put your hands on the wheel
| fairly regularly? Are these incidents just a matter of people
| using this feature outside of its intended use case?
| [deleted]
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| One hand on his phone one hand on the wheel, I assume.
|
| Newer versions of Autopilot watch to make sure you keep your
| eyes on the road, probably to prevent this very scenario[1].
|
| [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/27/22457430/tesla-in-car-
| cam...
| [deleted]
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Craziest statistic: of the 31 serious crashes involving driver-
| assist systems in the U.S. since June 2016, _25 of them_ involved
| Tesla Autopilot.
| blueplanet200 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
| gamblor956 wrote:
| It does not matter how you dice up the statistics. Of the
| millions of cars with driver assist, Tesla's make up the
| majority of serious accidents, and the majority of accidents
| of vehicles crashing into emergency vehicles on the road. On
| an absolute basis, relative basis, per capita basis, etc.,
| Tesla Autopilot has more, serious crashes than all other
| driver assist systems. (And note that this does not include
| any FSD-related accidents.)
|
| This is an issue because _Tesla_ markets its cars as being
| "safer" than other company's vehicles, and the data shows
| that their driver assist system is objectively not.
| gundmc wrote:
| This is why I believe the approach of incremental improvement
| towards full self driving is fundamentally flawed. These advanced
| driver assist tools are good enough to lull users into a false
| sense of security. No amount of "but our terms and conditions say
| you need to always pay attention!" will overcome human nature
| building that trust and dependence.
| antattack wrote:
| All Level 2 systems need to better integrate with the driver.
| Upon engagement driver and driver assist are team where
| communication and predictability is crucial.
| dalbasal wrote:
| I think the fundamental flaw is indisputable. Everyone is aware
| of in-between stage problems. I don't think it's an
| insurmountable flaw.
|
| These things are on the road already. They have issues, but so
| do human only cars. Tweaks probably get made, like some special
| handling of emergency vehicle scenarios. But, it's not enough
| to stop it.
|
| Meanwhile, it's not a permanent state. Self driving technology
| is advancing, becoming more common on roads. Procedures, as
| well as infrastructure, is growing around the existence of self
| driven cars. Human supervisor or not, the way these things use
| the road affects the design of roads. If your emergency speed
| sign isn't being headed by self driven cars, your emergency
| speed sign has a bug.
| slg wrote:
| One problem that is often ignored in these debates is that
| people already don't always pay attention while driving. Spend
| some time looking at other drivers next time you are a
| passenger in slow traffic. The number of drivers on their
| phones, eating, doing makeup, shaving, or even reading a book
| is scary.
|
| It therefore isn't a clean swap of a human paying attention to
| a human who isn't. It becomes a complicated equation that we
| can't just dismiss with "people won't pay attention". It is
| possible that a 90%/10% split of drivers paying attention to
| not paying attention is more dangerous when they are all
| driving manually than a 70%/30% split if those drivers are all
| using self-driving tech to cover for them. Wouldn't you feel
| safer if the driver behind you who is answering texts was using
| this incremental self-driving tech rather than driving
| manually?
|
| No one has enough data on the performance of these systems or
| how the population of drivers use them to say definitively that
| they are either safer or more dangerous on the whole. But it is
| definitely something that needs to be investigated and
| researched.
| MR4D wrote:
| A car that beeps when I drift out of lane, or beeps when I go
| too fast before a curve, or _beeps like hell_ if I cross over
| the center median would be hugely useful, because a record of
| every warning would be there, whether correct or not.
|
| Conversely, if it didn't warn me right before an accident, then
| the absence of that warning would be useful too.
|
| All of that information should be put back into the model based
| on crash reporting. Everything else can be ignored.
|
| I would argue that the information should be available to all
| automakers (perhaps using the NHTSA as a conduit), so that each
| of them have the same _safety information_ , but can still
| develop their own models. The FAA actually does this already
| with the FAA Accident and Incident Data Systems [0] and it has
| worked pretty darn well.
|
| [0] - https://www.asias.faa.gov/apex/f?p=100:2:::NO:::
| oceanghost wrote:
| The new Toyota RAV4's have this feature-- if you go out of
| bounds in your lane they beep and the steer5ing wheel gives a
| bit of resistance.
|
| It also reads the speed limit signs and places a reminder in
| the display. I think it can brake if it detects something in
| front of it, but I'm not certain.
| MR4D wrote:
| Many other cars do as well.
|
| My main point (perhaps buried more than it should have
| been) is that by centralizing accident data along with
| whether an alert went off (or not), and sharing that with
| all automobile manufacturers can help this process proceed
| better.
|
| Right now the data is highly fragmented and there is not
| really a common objective metric by which to make decisions
| to improve models.
| api wrote:
| Full self driving is one of those things where getting 80% of
| the way there will take 20% of the effort and getting the
| remaining 20% of the way there will take 80% of the effort.
|
| Tesla auto-drive seems like it's about 80% of the way there.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I actually disagree. (And before you respond, please read my
| post because it's not a trivial point.)
|
| The fact that an huge formal investigation happened with just a
| single casualty is proof that it may actually be superior for
| safety in the long-term (when combined with feedback from
| regulators and government investigators). One death in
| conventional vehicles is irrelevant. But because of the high
| profile of Tesla's technology, it garners a bunch of attention
| from the public and therefore regulators. This is PRECISELY the
| dynamic that led to the ridiculously safe airline record. The
| safer it is, the more that rare deaths will be investigated and
| the causes sussed out and fixed by industry and regulators
| together.
|
| Perhaps industry/Tesla/whoever hates the regulators and
| investigations. But I think they are precisely what will cause
| self driving to become ever safer, and eventually become as
| safe as industry/Tesla claims, safer than human drivers while
| also being cheap and ubiquitous. Just like airline travel
| today. A remarkable combination of safety and affordability.
|
| This might be the only way to ever do it. I don't think the
| airline industry could've ever gotten to current levels of
| safety by testing everything on closed airfields and over empty
| land for hundreds of millions of flight hours before they had
| sufficient statistics to be equal to today.
|
| It can't happen without regulators and enforcement, either.
| dboreham wrote:
| This line of thinking is flawed because it assumes a smooth
| surface over the safety space, where if you make incremental
| improvements you will head towards some maxima of safety.
| e.g. : the wing fell off; investigate; find that you can't
| use brittle aluminum; tell aircraft manf. to use a more
| ductile alloy. Self driving technology isn't like that -- you
| can't just file a bug "don't mistake a human for a plastic
| bag", fix that bug and move on to the next one. No number of
| incremental fixes will make self driving that works as any
| reasonable human would expect it to work.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| I largely agree with you, but I just wish regulators would
| start by only allowing these assist programs for people that
| are already known to be poor drivers. The elderly and
| convicted drunk drivers, for example. That way we could have
| the best of both worlds.
| unionpivo wrote:
| I disagree. I would not put people who shoved poor judgment
| in situation, where they can further hurt other or
| themselves it. People like that are more likely not to pay
| attention and do other irresponsible things.
|
| Go with safest drivers first.
| Seanambers wrote:
| Teslas Autopilot system is almost 10X safer than the
| average human driver already based on the latest 2021 Q1
| numbers.
|
| https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/VehicleSafetyReport
| [deleted]
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| That impressive claim narrows to approximately the noise
| floor if you compare to comparable drivers in comparable
| cars.
| [deleted]
| ben_w wrote:
| > In the 1st quarter, we registered one accident for
| every 4.19 million miles driven in which drivers had
| Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot
| but with our active safety features, we registered one
| accident for every 2.05 million miles driven. For those
| driving without Autopilot and without our active safety
| features, we registered one accident for every 978
| thousand miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA's most recent
| data shows that in the United States there is an
| automobile crash every 484,000 miles.
|
| I think the comparison should be Tesla with/without AI,
| not Tesla/not-Tesla; so roughly either x2 or x4 depending
| on what the other active safety features do.
|
| It's not nothing, but it's much less than the current
| sales pitch -- and the current sales pitch is itself the
| problem here, for many legislators.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| > we registered one accident for every 4.19 million miles
| driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged [...] for
| those driving without Autopilot but with our active
| safety features, we registered one accident for every
| 2.05 million miles driven
|
| This still isn't the correct comparison. Major selection
| bias with comparing miles with autopilot engaged to miles
| without it engaged, since autopilot cannot be engaged in
| all situations.
|
| A better test would be to compare accidents in Tesla
| vehicles with the autopilot feature enabled (engaged or
| not) to accidents in Tesla vehicles with the autopilot
| feature disabled.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Even then, there's selection: people who do a lot of
| highway driving are more likely to opt for Autopilot than
| those who mostly drive in the city.
| bluGill wrote:
| As was stated elsewhere, most accidents happen in city
| driving where autopilot cannot be activated so the
| with/without AI is meaningless. We need to figure out
| when the AI could have been activated but wasn't, if you
| do that then you are correct.
| freshpots wrote:
| "..most accidents happen in city driving where autopilot
| cannot be activated so the with."
|
| Yes it can. The only time it can't be activated is if
| there is no clearly marked center line.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| On the contrary to your overall point: The fatal crash
| rate per miles driven is almost 2 times higher in rural
| areas than urban areas. Urban areas may have more
| accidents, but the speeds are likely lower (fender
| benders).
|
| https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-
| statistics/detail/urban...
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Tesla's _vehicles_ are almost 10X safer than the average
| _vehicle_. Whether their autopilot system is contributing
| positively or negatively to that safety record is
| unclear.
|
| The real test of this would be: of all Tesla vehicles,
| are the ones with autopilot enabled statistically safer
| or less safe than the ones without autopilot enabled?
| input_sh wrote:
| ...according to Tesla, based on the data nobody else can
| see?
| czzr wrote:
| No, it's not. I guess we're doomed to see this at-best-
| misleading-but-really-just-straight-up-lying analysis
| every time there's an article about this.
|
| Makes me laugh, especially with the "geeks are immune to
| marketing" trope that floats around here equally as
| regularly.
| ra7 wrote:
| Tesla's safety report lacks data and is extremely
| misleading.
|
| 1. Autopilot only works on (or intended to work on)
| highways. But they are comparing their highway record to
| all accident records including city driving, where
| accident rate is far higher than highway driving.
|
| 2. They're also comparing with every vehicle in the
| United States including millions of older vehicles.
| Modern vehicles are built for higher safety and have a
| ton of active safety features (emergency braking,
| collision prevention etc). Older vehicles are much more
| prone to accidents and that skews the numbers.
|
| The reality is Teslas are no safer than any other
| vehicles in its class ($40k+). Their safety report is
| purely marketing spin.
| deegles wrote:
| They also include miles driven by previous versions of
| their software in the "safe miles driven" tally. There's
| no guarantee any improvement would not have resulted in
| more accidents. They should reset the counter on every
| release.
| wilg wrote:
| > The reality is Teslas are no safer than any other
| vehicles in its class ($40k+).
|
| Would another way of saying this be that they are as safe
| as other vehicles in that class? And that therefore
| Autopilot is not more unsafe than driving those other
| cars?
| ra7 wrote:
| I would probably agree, but I also think it's a case of
| "need more data".
|
| We should really compare Autopilot with its competitors
| like GM's Super Cruise or Ford's Blue Cruise, both of
| which offer more capabilities than Autopilot. That will
| show if Tesla's driver assist system is more or less safe
| than their competitors product.
| ggreer wrote:
| What capabilities does GM or Ford have that Tesla
| doesn't? Neither GM nor Ford have rolled out automatic
| lane changing. Teslas have been doing that since 2019.
|
| The reason GM's Super Cruise got a higher rating by
| Consumer Reports was because CR didn't even test the
| capabilities that only Tesla had (such as automatic lane
| change and taking offramps/onramps). Also, the majority
| of the evaluation criteria weren't about capabilities.
| eg: "unresponsive driver", "clear when safe to use", and
| "keeping the driver engaged".[1]
|
| 1. https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/cadillac-
| super-cr...
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| Incentivizing drunk driving seems dangerous.
| joshgrib wrote:
| Requiring people to buy a special car/system to be able
| to drive doesn't seem like an incentive - it seems
| similar to the interlock system we currently require
| drunk drivers to purchase to be able to drive.
|
| If anything a driver monitoring system seems even better
| than the interlock system, for example you couldn't have
| your kids/friends blow for you to bypass it.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Ignoring other issues.
|
| Asking someone to pay attention when they are not doing
| anything is unrealistic. I would be constantly bored /
| distracted. My wife would instantly fall asleep. Etc etc.
| vntok wrote:
| This argument is flawed, because when regulators investigate
| a Tesla crash, Waymo doesn't care the slightest. The
| technologies (emphasis on having skeuomorphic cameras vs a
| lidar), approaches (emphasis on generating as many situations
| as possible in simulated worlds and carefully transitioning
| to the business case vs testing as early in the real world
| with background data captation) and results are so different
| between the actors in this specific industry that one's flaws
| being fixed or improved won't necessarily translate into
| others benefitting from it.
|
| Conversely, when Waymo iterates and improves their own safety
| ratios by a significant amount, that evidently does not
| result in Tesla's improving in return.
| unionpivo wrote:
| well when regulators investigate Boing, Airbus probably
| doesn't care either.
|
| Until it leads to something systemic, that then regulator
| mandates for all vehicles
| vntok wrote:
| Boeing and Airbus operate largely in the same direction
| with similar technical solutions to somilar problems.
|
| Not the case at all between lidars and cameras.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Then why not flip the scheme. Instead of have the human as
| backup to the machine, make the machine backup the human. Let
| the human do all the driving and have the robot jump in
| whenever the human makes a mistake. Telemetry can then record
| all the situations where the human and the machine disagreed.
| That should provide all the necessary data, with the benefit
| of the robot perhaps preventing many accidents.
|
| Of course this is impossible in the real world. Nobody is
| going to buy a car that will randomly make its own decisions,
| that will pull the wheel from your hands ever time it thinks
| you are making an illegal lane change. Want safety? How about
| a Tesla that is electronically incapable of speeding. Good
| luck selling that one.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Of course this is impossible in the real world. Nobody is
| going to buy a car that will randomly make its own
| decisions, that will pull the wheel from your hands ever
| time it thinks you are making an illegal lane change.
|
| Yeah, add to that the unreliability of Tesla's system means
| that it _cannot_ pull the wheel from the driver, because it
| 's not unusual for it to want to do something dangerous and
| need to be stopped. You don't want it to "fix" a mistake by
| driving someone into the median divider.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| > Want safety? How about a Tesla that is electronically
| incapable of speeding.
|
| That would be unsafe in many situations. If the flow of
| traffic is substantially above the speed limit--which it
| often is--being unable to match it increases the risk of
| accident. This is known as the Solomon curve [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_curve
| [deleted]
| MichaelGroves wrote:
| A self driving car obviously needs to be aware of other
| cars on the road. I don't see any reason why the car
| couldn't observe other cars, see what speed they are
| going at, and refuse to go faster than the rest. A car
| that refuses to do 120mph when all the other cars are
| doing 60mph in a 50mph zone should be trivial.
|
| (Trivial _if_ the self driving tech works at all....)
| TheCapn wrote:
| You're getting downvoted for this comment apparently, but
| I'm still of the firm belief that we will never see full
| autonomous driving without some sort of P2P network among
| cars/infrastructure.
|
| There's just too much shit that can't be "seen" with a
| camera/sensor in conjested traffic. Having a swarm of
| vehicles all gathering/sharing data is one of the only
| true ways forward IMO.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Ok. Electronically incapable of driving more than 10%
| faster than other traffic.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| How do you know which traffic is "the other traffic"? So
| basically - there's no top limit.
| treesknees wrote:
| > Subsequent research suggests significant biases in the
| Solomon study, which may cast doubt on its findings
|
| With the logic presented in the theoretical foundation
| section, it seems that the safer move would actually be
| slow down and match the speed of all the trucks and other
| large vehicles... which won't happen.
|
| Matching speed sounds great, except there are always
| people willing to go faster and faster. In my state they
| raised the speed limit from 70 to 75, it just means more
| people are going 85-90. How is that safer?
| filoleg wrote:
| To address your last paragraph, everyone going 85-90 is
| less safe than everyone going 70-75, you are correct.
|
| However, you individually going 70-75 when everyone else
| is going 85-90 is less safe than you going 85-90 like
| everyone else in the exact same situation.
|
| >there are always people willing to go faster and faster
|
| That's why no one says "go as fast as the fastest vehicle
| you see", it is "go with the general speed of traffic".
| That's an exercise for human judgement to figure that one
| out, which is why imo it isn't a smart idea to have the
| car automatically lock you out of overriding the speed
| limit.
| kiba wrote:
| People are going faster because they felt it's safer, not
| because of the speed limit. You can design roads that
| cause humans to slow down and be more careful.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Or you can just set the speed limit appropriately, in
| accordance with sound engineering principles. A radical
| notion, I guess.
| velcii wrote:
| >Let the human do all the driving and have the robot jump
| in whenever the human makes a mistake.
|
| I really don't think that would give many data points,
| because all of the instances would be when a human fell
| asleep or wasn't paying attention.
| [deleted]
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > * Let the human do all the driving and have the robot
| jump in whenever the human makes a mistake.*
|
| Because when the human disagrees with the machine, the
| machine is usually the one making a mistake. It might
| prevent accidents, but it would also cause them, and you
| lose predictability in the process (you have to model the
| human _and_ the machine).
| foobiekr wrote:
| I don't know how anyone can look at the types of
| accidents Tesla is having and conclude that it should
| override the human driver.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| > How about a Tesla that is electronically incapable of
| speeding. Good luck selling that one.
|
| Instead they did the exact opposite with the plaid mode
| model S, lol. It kind of works against their claims that
| they prioritize safety when their hottest new car - fully
| intended for public roads - has as its main selling point
| the ability to accelerate from 60-120 mph faster than any
| other car.
| jeofken wrote:
| On most or all roads below 100km/h autopilot won't allow
| speeding, and therefore I drive at the limit, which I know
| I would not have done if I controlled it. It also stays in
| the lane better than I do, keeps distance better, and more.
| Sometimes it's wonky when the street lines are unclear.
| It's not perfect but a better driver than I am in 80% of
| cases.
|
| My insurance company gives a lower rate if you buy the full
| autopilot option, and that to me indicates they agree it
| drives better than I, or other humans, do.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| _On most or all roads below 100km /h autopilot won't
| allow speeding, and therefore I drive at the limit, which
| I know I would not have done if I controlled it_
|
| If following the speed limit makes cars safer, another
| way to achieve that without autopilot is to just have all
| cars limit their speed to the speed limit.
|
| _Sometimes it's wonky when the street lines are unclear.
| It's not perfect but a better driver than I am in 80% of
| cases_
|
| The problem is in those 20% of cases where you'd lulled
| into boredom by autopilot as you concentrate on designing
| your next project in your head, then suddenly autopilot
| says "I lost track of where the road is, here you do it!"
| and you have to quickly gain context and figure out what
| the right thing to do is.
|
| Some autopilot systems use eye tracking to make sure that
| the driver is at least looking at the road, but that
| doesn't guarantee that he's paying attention. But at
| least that's harder to defeat than Tesla's "nudge the
| steering wheel once in a while" method.
| beambot wrote:
| > just have all cars limit their speed to the speed
| limit.
|
| The devil is in the details... GPS may not provide
| sufficient resolution. Construction zones. School zones
| with variable hours. Tunnels. Adverse road conditions.
| Changes to the underlying roads. Different classes of
| vehicles. Etc.
|
| By the time you account for all the mapping and/or
| perception, you could've just improved the autonomous
| driving and eliminated the biggest source of humans
| driving: The human.
| asdff wrote:
| GPS is extremely accurate honestly. My garmen adjusts
| itself the very instant I cross over a speed limit sign
| to a new speed, somehow. Maybe they have good metadata,
| but its all public anyway under some department of
| transportation domain and probably not hard to mine with
| the price of compute these days. Even just setting a top
| speed in residential areas of like 35mph would be good
| and save a lot of lives that are lost when pedestrians
| meet cars traveling at 50mph. A freeway presents a good
| opportunity to add sensors to the limited on and off
| ramps for the car to detect that its on a freeway. Many
| freeways already have some sort of sensor based system
| for charging fees.
|
| What would be even easier than all of that, though, is
| just installing speeding cameras and mailing tickets.
| watt wrote:
| Just add all those to the map system. It could be made
| incredibly accurate, if construction companies are able
| to actually submit their work zones and "geofence" them
| off on the map.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| But you can still impose a max speed limit based on
| available data to cover most normal driving conditions
| but it's still on the driver to drive slower if
| appropriate. And that could be implemented today, not a
| decade from now when autonomous driving is trustable.
|
| The parent post said that autopilot won't let him go over
| the speed limit and implies that makes him safer. My
| point is that you don't need full autopilot for that.
|
| So this is not a technical problem at all, but a
| political one. As the past year has shown, people won't
| put up with any convenience or restriction, even if it
| could save lives (not even if it could save thousands of
| lives)
| freeone3000 wrote:
| The single system you're describing, with all of its
| complexity, is a subset of what is required for
| autonomous vehicles. We will continue to have road
| construction, tunnels, and weather long past the last
| human driver. Improving the system here simply improves
| the system here -- you cannot forsake this work by saying
| "oh the autonomous system will solve it" -- this is part
| of the autonomous system.
| jeofken wrote:
| During the 3 years I've owned it there are 2 places where
| lines are wonky and I know to take over.
|
| I have not yet struggled to stay alert when it drives me,
| and it has driven better than I would have - so it
| certainly is an improvement over me driving 100% of the
| time. It does not have road rage and it does not enjoy
| the feeling of speeding, like I do when I drive, nor does
| it feel like driving is a competition, like I must admit
| I do when I am hungry, stressed, or tired.
|
| > just have all cars limit their speed to the speed limit
|
| No way I'd buy a car that does not accelerate when I hit
| the pedal. Would you buy a machine that is not your
| servant?
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| >Let the human do all the driving and have the robot jump
| in whenever the human makes a mistake.
|
| Nothing more annoying then a car that thinks i don't know
| how to drive (warning beeps etc.).
| alistairSH wrote:
| _Nobody is going to buy a car that will randomly make its
| own decisions, that will pull the wheel from your hands
| ever time it thinks you are making an illegal lane change._
|
| That's almost exactly what my Honda does. Illegal (no
| signal) lane change results in a steering wheel shaker (and
| optional audio alert). And the car, when sensing an abrupt
| swerve which is interpreted as the vehicle leaving the
| roadway, attempts to correct that via steering and brake
| inputs.
|
| But, I agree with your more general point - the human still
| needs to be primary. My Honda doesn't allow me to remove my
| hands from the steering wheel for more than a second or
| two. Tesla should be doing the same, as no current
| "autopilot" system is truly automatic.
| nthj wrote:
| Just to add, I have a 2021 Honda, and disabling this
| functionality is a 1-button-press toggle on the dash to
| the left of the steering wheel. Not mandatory.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Tesla's system also requires driving's to have their
| hands on the steering wheel and occasionally provide
| torque input.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Interesting, I assumed it didn't, given the prevalence of
| stories about driver watching movies on their phones. I
| guess they just leave one hand lightly on the wheel, but
| are still able to be ~100% disengaged from driving the
| car.
| peeters wrote:
| > Illegal (no signal) lane change results in a steering
| wheel shaker (and optional audio alert).
|
| To be clear, tying the warning to the signal isn't about
| preventing unsignaled lane changes, it's gauging driver
| intent (i.e. is he asleep and drifting or just trying to
| change lanes). It's just gravy that it will train bad
| drivers to use their signals properly.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Correct. It's not (primarily) a training thing, but used
| to ensure the driver is driving and not sleeping/watching
| movies/whatever.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Is a lane change without signal always illegal? I know
| that it almost certainly make you liable for any
| resulting accident, but I'm not sure that it is
| universally illegal.
| hermitdev wrote:
| Yes, failure to signal is a traffic violation. At least
| everywhere I've lived/traveled in the US. It's also a
| rather convenient excuse for police to "randomly" pull
| you over (I've been pulled over by Chicago PD for not
| signaling for a lane change, despite actually having done
| so).
| peeters wrote:
| This is technically true in Ontario (TIL).
|
| > 142 (1) The driver or operator of a vehicle upon a
| highway before turning (...) from one lane for traffic to
| another lane for traffic (...) shall first see that the
| movement can be made in safety, and _if the operation of
| any other vehicle may be affected by the movement_ shall
| give a signal plainly visible to the driver or operator
| of the other vehicle of the intention to make the
| movement. R.S.O. 1990, c. H.8, s. 142 (1).
|
| That said there's zero cost to doing so regardless of
| whether other drivers are affected.
|
| https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90h08#BK243
| sandworm101 wrote:
| That's the sort of law I remember. It is considered a
| failure to communicate your intention rather than a
| violation per se in every circumstance.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Is a lane change without signal always illegal? I know
| that it almost certainly make you liable for any
| resulting accident
|
| Usually, it makes you liable _because_ it is illegal. CA
| law for instance reqires signalling 100ft before a lane
| change or turn.
| alistairSH wrote:
| I have no idea, but the point wasn't so much that the
| lane change is illegal, but that lack of signal is used
| to indicate lack of driver attention. I shouldn't have
| used "illegal" in my original post.
| ohazi wrote:
| > That's almost exactly what my Honda does. Illegal (no
| signal) lane change results in a steering wheel shaker
| (and optional audio alert). And the car, when sensing an
| abrupt swerve which is interpreted as the vehicle leaving
| the roadway, attempts to correct that via steering and
| brake inputs.
|
| By the way, this is fucking terrifying when you first
| encounter it in a rental car on a dark road with poor
| lane markings while just trying to get to your hotel
| after a five hour flight.
|
| I didn't encounter an obvious wheel shaker, but this
| psychotic car was just yanking the wheel in different
| directions as I was trying to merge onto a highway.
|
| Must be what a malfunctioning MCAS felt like in a 737
| MAX, but thankfully without the hundreds of pounds of
| hydraulic force.
| gambiting wrote:
| I keep saying the same thing actually whenever people say
| that manual driving will be outlawed. Like, no, it won't be
| - because the computers will still save you in most cases
| either way, autopilot enabled or not.
|
| >>How about a Tesla that is electronically incapable of
| speeding. Good luck selling that one.
|
| From 2022 all cars sold in the EU have to have an
| electronic limiter that keeps you to the posted speed
| limit(by cutting power if you are already going faster) -
| the regulation does allow the system to be temporarily
| disabled however.
| ggreer wrote:
| Your summary is incorrect. The ETSC recommends that
| Intelligent Speed Assistance should be able to be
| overridden.[1] It's supposed to not accelerate as much if
| you're exceeding the speed limit, and if you override by
| pressing the accelerator harder, it should show some
| warning messages and make an annoying sound. It's stupid,
| but it doesn't actually limit the speed of your car.
|
| I think it's a silly law and I'm very glad I don't live
| in a place that requires such annoyances, but it's not as
| bad as you're claiming.
|
| 1. https://etsc.eu/briefing-intelligent-speed-assistance-
| isa/
| Symbiote wrote:
| I hired a new car with Intelligent Speed Assistance this
| summer, though it was set (and I left it) just to "ping"
| rather than do any limiting. I drove it to a fairly
| unusual place, though still in Europe and with standard
| European signs. It did not have a GPS map of the area.
|
| It could reliably recognize the speed limit signs (red
| circle), but it never recognized the similar grey-slash
| end-of-limit signs. It also didn't recognize the start-
| of-town or end-of-town signs, so it didn't do anything
| about the limits they implied.
|
| I would certainly have had to disable it, had it been
| reducing the acceleration in the way that document
| describes.
| Someone wrote:
| I think that's the approach many car manufacturers have
| been on for decades.
|
| As a simple example, ABS
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-lock_braking_system)
| only interferes with what the driver does when an error
| occurs.
|
| More related to self-driving, there's various variants of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lane_departure_warning_system
| that do take control of the car.
|
| And it is far from "incapable of speeding", but BMW, Audi
| and Mercedes-Benz "voluntarily" and sort-of limit the speed
| of their cars to 250km/hour
| (https://www.autoevolution.com/news/gentlemens-agreement-
| not-...)
| judge2020 wrote:
| Your reasoning doesn't apply to the incremental improvements to
| self-driving, rather Tesla's decision to allow all cars to use
| TACC/auto-steer. They haven't even given people "the button" to
| enroll in FSD beta, likely because they know it would be
| extremely bad PR when a bunch of people use it without paying
| attention.
| nathias wrote:
| that's not human nature, that's user stupidity
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| What's the... Difference?
| nathias wrote:
| One is a permanent property of our nature the other a
| choice.
| [deleted]
| formerly_proven wrote:
| The design is fine, it's all the users who are idiots.
|
| P.S. /s. Obviously, Mr. Poe.
| salawat wrote:
| T. Every maligned designer when someone points out a flaw
|
| It's okay. I do it too. Really need to work on seeing
| yourself making that argument as a starting point and not
| an endpoint.
| rvz wrote:
| Well they did not _' pay'_ attention. They _' paid'_ for
| the "Fools Self Driving" package.
|
| This is why 'attention' and 'driver monitoring' was not
| included.
| mnmmn123456 wrote:
| Today, there is at least one of the most advanced Neural
| Networks entering each car: A human being. If we could just
| implement the AI to add to this person and not replace it...
| ben_w wrote:
| What would such an AI even look like? If it spots every
| _real_ danger but also hallucinates even a few dangers that
| aren't really there, it gets ignored or switched off for
| needlessly slowing the traveler down (false positives,
| apparently an issue with early Google examples [0]); if it
| only spots real dangers but misses most of them, it is not
| helping (false negatives, even worse if a human is blindly
| assuming the machine knows best and what happened with e.g.
| Uber [1]); if it's about the same as humans overall but makes
| different _types_ of mistake, people rely on it right up
| until it crashes then go apoplectic because it didn't see
| something any human would consider obvious (e.g. Tesla, which
| gets _slightly_ safer when the AI is active, but people keep
| showing the AI getting confused about things that they
| consider obvious [2]).
|
| [0] https://theoatmeal.com/blog/google_self_driving_car
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg
|
| [2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=Wz6Ins1D9ak
| salawat wrote:
| This is the bit nobody likes to realize. FSD at it's
| best...is still about as fallible as a human driver. Minus
| free will (it is hoped).
|
| I will be amused, intrigued, and possibly a bit horrified if
| by the time FSD hits level 5, and they stick with the Neural
| Net of Neural Nets architecture if there isn't a rash of
| system induced variance in behavior as emergent phenomena
| take shape.
|
| Imagined news: All Tesla's on I-95 engaged in creating
| patterns whereby all non-Teala traffic was bordered by a
| Tesla on each side. Almost like a game of Go, says expert.
| Researchers stumped.
|
| Then again, that's imply you had an NN capable of retraining
| itself on the fly to some limited degree, which I assume no
| one sane would put into service... Hopefully this comment
| doesn't suffer a date of not aging well.
| fzzzy wrote:
| Do you hate regular cruise control? How is that not partial
| self driving?
| ghaff wrote:
| To tell you the truth, I generally do and haven't used it for
| ages. Where I drive, the roads have some amount of traffic. I
| find (traditional) cruise control encourages driving at a
| constant speed to a degree that I wouldn't as a driver with a
| foot on the gas. So I don't "hate" regular cruise control but
| I basically never use it.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| I think you are in a distinct minority.
| ghaff wrote:
| Maybe a fairly small sample size but I don't know the
| last time I've been in a car where the driver has turned
| on cruise control. But it probably varies by area of the
| country. In the Northeast, there's just enough traffic in
| general that it's not worth it for me.
| minhazm wrote:
| In traffic is where traffic aware cruise control is most
| useful. A lot of people I knew who bought Tesla's in the
| bay area specifically bought it so their commutes would
| be less stressful with the bumper to bumper traffic. I
| drove 3000+ miles across the country last year with > 90%
| of it on AP and I was way less tired with AP on vs off
| and it allowed me to just stay focused on the road and
| look out for any issues.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes. I was (explicitly) talking about traditional "dumb"
| cruise control. I haven't used adaptive cruise control
| but I agree it sounds more useful than traditional cruise
| control once you get above minimal traffic.
| int_19h wrote:
| One thing worth noting about Subaru's approach to this
| that is specifically relevant to bumper-to-bumper
| traffic, is that it will stop by itself, but it won't
| _start moving_ by itself - the driver needs to tap the
| accelerator for that. It will warn you when the car in
| front starts moving, though.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| > you need to always pay attention
|
| That is the fatal flaw in anything but a perfect system - any
| kind of system that is taking the decisions about steering from
| the driver is going to result in the driver at best thinking
| about other things and worse getting into the back seat to
| change. If you had to develop a system to make sure someone was
| paying attention, you wouldn't make them sit in a warm comfy
| seat looking at a screen - you would make them actively engage
| with what they were looking at - like steering.
|
| And ultimately it doesn't matter how many hundreds of thousands
| of hours of driving you teach your system with, it may
| eventually be able to learn about parked cars, kerbs and road
| signs, but there won't be enough examples of different
| accidents and how emergency vehicles behave to ever make it
| behave safely. Humans can cope with driving emergencies fairly
| well (not perfectly admittedly) no matter how many they've been
| involved in using logic and higher level reasoning.
| dheera wrote:
| Is it? Tesla is still alive because they're selling cars.
|
| It's just that the companies that are NOT doing incremental
| approaches are largely at the mercy of some investors who don't
| know a thing about self-driving, and they may die at any time.
|
| I agree with you that it is _technically_ flawed, but it may
| still be viable in the end. At least their existence is not
| dependent on the mercy of some fools who don 't get it, they
| just sell cars to stay alive.
|
| That's one of the major problems of today's version of
| capitalism -- it encourages technically flawed ways to achieve
| scientific advancement.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| Would be interesting to know how many buy based on the fsd
| hype(including the ones who don't pay for the package) and
| how many buy because of the "green" factor. However many
| there are who buy because of the fsd promise, all that
| revenue is coming from vaporware (beta ware at best) and is
| possible due to lack of regulatory enforcement. History shows
| that the longer the self regulatory entities take the p, the
| harder the regulatory hammer comes down eventually.
| cmpb wrote:
| I disagree. One feature my car has is to pull me back into the
| lane when I veer out of it (Subaru's lane keep assist). That is
| still incremental improvement towards "full self driving". I
| agree, however, that Tesla's Autopilot is not functional
| enough, and any tool designed to allow humans to remove their
| hands from the wheel should not require their immediate
| attention in any way.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Tesla's autopilot does not allow you to remove your hands
| from the wheel. You must keep them on, and apply torque
| occasionally, to keep it engaged.
| Karunamon wrote:
| In reality, it'll let you get away with going handsfree for
| upwards of 30 seconds. That's more than long enough to lose
| your attention.
| tapoxi wrote:
| I think people just assume Tesla's Autopilot is more capable
| than it really is.
|
| My car has adaptive cruise control and lane keep assist, but
| I'm not relying on either for anything more complex than
| sipping a drink while on the highway.
| rmckayfleming wrote:
| Yep, if anything they're just a way to make long drives or
| stop and go highway traffic more tolerable. When I got my
| first car with those features it seemed like a gimmick, but
| they really help to reduce fatigue.
| mrfusion wrote:
| I'd be curious if there are studies out there on how to do
| automated assists in machines that require vigilance that don't
| have this problem.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Both airplanes and trains have automated "assist." At least
| in the case of WMATA they give up on automatic train control
| after a fatal crash.
| userbinator wrote:
| In a plane you also have far more time to react once the
| autopilot disconnects for whatever reason, than the
| fraction of a second that a car gives you.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Then the automation needs to be more conservative in its
| ability and request intervention sooner.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| The difference is, they have traffic controllers and the
| train have their own dedicated rails, almost no
| obstructions and a train into train crash danger situation
| rarely arises. The planes have a lot of maneuvering space
| to all sides.
|
| Car traffic and streets are more dense and often have
| humans crossing them without regards to laws, bicycles,
| motorbikes, road construction and bad weather.
|
| Not saying one auto pilot system is better than the other,
| however, they operate in different environments.
| merrywhether wrote:
| This is a misrepresentation of the dumpster fire that was
| the WMATA train situation. Yes, the fatal crash was the
| last straw, but the root problem was not the automation
| system but rather the complete lack of maintenance that led
| to its inability to work properly. Congress refusing to
| fund maintenance and then falling behind 10-15 years on it
| lead to all kinds of systems failing. The fatal fire in the
| blue line tunnel under the river occurred with a human at
| the controls, but we're similarly not blaming that incident
| on the perils of human operation.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| I don't blame the operator for the crash. The other train
| was behind a blind curve and she hit the emergency brake
| within a reasonable amount of time given what she could
| see. However the speeds of the system were set too high
| for the operator to safely stop because they assumed the
| ATC would work perfectly.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I have a Subaru Forester base model with lane keeping and
| adaptive cruise control.
|
| I need to be touching the wheel and applying some force to it
| or it begins yelling at me and eventually brings me slowly to a
| stop.
|
| I've had it for a year now and I cannot perceive of a way,
| without physically altering the system (like hanging a weight
| from the wheel maybe?) that would allow me to stop being an
| active participant.
|
| I think the opposite is true: Tesla's move fast and kill people
| approach is the mistake. Incremental mastering of autonomous
| capabilities is the way to go.
| ChrisClark wrote:
| That's exactly what my Tesla does. I need a constant torque
| on the steering wheel or it yells at me and slowly comes to a
| stop.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Personally I've found this to be sufficient in my Forester.
| Even holding the wheel but not being "there" isn't enough.
| The car is really picky about it.
| SEJeff wrote:
| You're literally describing how the Tesla system works. It
| requires you to keep your hand on the wheel and apply a
| slight pressure every so often. The cabin camera watches the
| driver and if they're looking down or at their phone, it does
| that much more often.
|
| People causing these problems almost certainly are putting
| something over the cabin camera and a defeat device on the
| steering wheel.
| jeffnappi wrote:
| I own a Model Y and am a pretty heavy Autopilot user. You
| have to regularly give input on the steering wheel and if you
| fail a few times it won't let you re-engage until you park
| and start again.
|
| Personally Autopilot has actually made driving safer for
| me... I think there's likely abuse of the system though that
| Tesla could work harder to prevent.
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| I personally think the issue boils down to their use of the
| term "Autopilot" for a product that is not Autpilot (and
| never will be with the sensor array they're using IMO.)
|
| They are sending multiple signals that this car can drive
| itself (going so far as charging people money explicitly
| for the "self-driving" feature) when it cannot in the
| slightest do much more than stay straight on an empty
| highway.
|
| They should be forced to change the name of the self-
| driving features, I personally think "Backseat Driver"
| would be more appropriate.
| jhgb wrote:
| > the issue boils down to their use of the term
| "Autopilot" for a product that is not Autpilot
|
| It is literally an autopilot. Just like an autopilot on
| an airplane, it keeps you stable and in a certain flight
| corridor. There's virtually no difference except for
| Tesla's Autopilot's need to deal with curved
| trajectories.
| labcomputer wrote:
| > There's virtually no difference except for Tesla's
| Autopilot's need to deal with curved trajectories.
|
| Well, and it actively avoids collisions with other
| vehicles (most of the time). Airplane (and boat)
| autopilots don't do that.
|
| "But you're using the word autopilot wrong!"
| Kaytaro wrote:
| Autopilot is precisely the correct term - An autopilot is
| a system used to control the path of an aircraft, marine
| craft or spacecraft without requiring constant manual
| control by a human operator. _Autopilots do not replace
| human operators._
| gccs wrote:
| Shove a can of soda in the wheel and it will stop beeping.
| mellavora wrote:
| yes, but what if you also have to sing the jingle?
|
| Damn, this 'drink verification can' is going to get us all
| killed.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Tesla had a similar system, and
|
| > physically altering the system (like hanging a weight from
| the wheel maybe?)
|
| was exactly what people were doing. But it's also possible to
| be physically present, applying force, but being "zoned out",
| even without malicious intent.
| johnnyApplePRNG wrote:
| >But it's also possible to be physically present, applying
| force, but being "zoned out", even without malicious
| intent.
|
| I've occasionally noticed myself zoning out behind the
| wheel of my non-self-driving car as well.
|
| It's actually very common. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.actuarialpost.co.uk/article/quarter-of-
| fatal-cra...
| shakna wrote:
| > I need to be touching the wheel and applying some force to
| it or it begins yelling at me and eventually brings me slowly
| to a stop.
|
| > I've had it for a year now and I cannot perceive of a way,
| without physically altering the system (like hanging a weight
| from the wheel maybe?) that would allow me to stop being an
| active participant.
|
| That's exactly what people were doing with the Tesla. Hanging
| a weight to ensure the safety system doesn't kick in. [0][1]
|
| [0] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/28/cars/tesla-texas-
| crash-au...
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/ItsKimJava/status/1388240600491859968
| /ph...
| Waterluvian wrote:
| If people are consciously modifying their car to defeat
| obvious safety systems, I have a really hard time seeing
| how the auto manufacturer should be responsible.
|
| I guess the probe will reveal what share of fatal accidents
| are caused by this.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Well, it doesn't help when the CEO of the company
| publically states that the system is good enough to drive
| on its own and those safety systems are only there
| because of regulatory requirements.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| It depends. As long as the resulting package (flawed self
| driving system + the average driver) isn't significantly more
| dangerous than the average unassisted human driver, I don't
| consider it irresponsible to deploy it.
|
| "The average driver" includes everyone, ranging from drivers
| using it as intended with close supervision, drivers who become
| inattentive because nothing is happening, and drivers who think
| it's a reasonable idea to climb into the back seat with a water
| bottle duct taped to the steering wheel to bypass the sensor.
|
| OTOH, the average driver for the unassisted scenario also
| includes the driver who thinks they're able to drive a car
| while texting.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > As long as the resulting package (flawed self driving
| system + the average driver) isn't significantly more
| dangerous than the average unassisted human driver...
|
| Shouldn't that compared to "average driver + myriad of modern
| little safety features" instead of "average unassisted
| driver"? The one who has the means to drive a Tesla with the
| "full driving" mode certain has the means to buy, say, a
| Toyota full of assistance/safety features (lane change
| assist, unwanted lane change warning and whatnots).
| politician wrote:
| Why isn't defeating the self-driving attention controls a
| crime like reckless driving? Isn't that the obvious
| solution?
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| It almost certainly is, at least when combined with the
| intentional inattention that follows.
|
| Making it a crime isn't an "obvious solution" to actually
| make it not happen. Drunk driving is a crime and yet
| people keep doing it. Same with texting and driving.
| politician wrote:
| The problem is determining who is liable for damages, not
| prevention. Shifting the liability for willfully
| disabling a safety control puts them on notice.
|
| Prevention as a goal is how we end up with dystopia.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Gonna be pretty difficult to enforce. Many US states
| don't even enforce a minimum roadworthiness of cars on
| the roads.
| politician wrote:
| Does that even matter? If the state doesn't care to
| enforce its laws against reckless driving, why should the
| manufacturer be encumbered with that responsibility?
| jdavis703 wrote:
| The average driver breaks multiple laws on every trip. Most
| of the time no one gets hurt. But calibrating performance
| against folks violating traffic and criminal laws sets the
| bar too low for an automated system. We should be aiming for
| standards that either match European safety levels or the
| safety of modes of air travel or rail travel.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Yes, I agree. We should hold automated systems to a higher
| standard. Unless you're proposing we ban automated systems
| until they're effectively perfect because that would
| perversely result in a worse outcome: being stuck with
| unassisted driving forever.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| I disagree. Perfect is the enemy of good, and rejecting a
| better system because it isn't perfect seems like an absurd
| choice.
|
| I'm not saying improvements should stop there, but once the
| system has reached parity, it's OK to deploy it and let it
| improve from there.
| bcrl wrote:
| Except that doesn't work if you're trying to produce a
| safe product. Investigations into crashes in the airline
| industry have proven that removing pilots from active
| participation in the control loop of the airplane results
| in distraction and an increased response time when an
| abnormal situation occurs. Learning how to deal with this
| is part of pilots' training, plus they have a co-pilot to
| keep an eye on things and back them up.
|
| An imperfect self driving vehicle is the worst of all
| worlds: they lull the driver into the perception that the
| vehicle is safe while not being able to handle abnormal
| situations. The fact that there are multiple crashes on
| the record where Telsas have driven into stationary
| trucks and obstacles on roads is pretty damning proof
| that drivers can't always react in the time required when
| an imperfect self driving system is in use. They're not
| intrinsically safe.
|
| At the very least drivers should be required additional
| training to operate these systems. Like pilots, drivers
| need to be taught how to recognize when things go awry
| and react to possible failures. Anything less is not
| rooted in safety culture, and it's good to see there are
| at least a few people starting to shine the light on how
| these systems are being implemented from a safety
| perspective.
| notahacker wrote:
| > Perfect is the enemy of good, and rejecting a better
| system because it isn't perfect seems like an absurd
| choice.
|
| Nothing absurd about thinking a system which has parity
| with the average human driver is too risky to buy unless
| you consider yourself to be below average at driving. (As
| it is, most people consider themselves to be better than
| average drivers, and some of them are even right!) The
| accident statistics that comprise the "average human
| accident rate" are also disproportionately caused by
| humans you'd try to discourage from driving in those
| circumstances...
|
| Another very obvious problem is that an automated system
| which kills at the same rate per mile as an average human
| drivers will tend to be driven a lot more because no
| effort (and probably replace better-than-average
| commercial drivers long before teenagers and occasional-
| but-disproportionately-deadly drivers can afford it).
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| > drivers using it as intended with close supervision
|
| Doesn't this hide a paradox? Using a self-driving car as
| intended implies that the driver relinquishes a part of the
| human decision making process to the car. While close
| supervision implies that the driver can always take control
| back from the car, and therefore carries full personal
| responsibility of what happens.
|
| The caveat here is that the car might make decisions in a
| rapidly changing, complex context which the driver might
| disagree with, but has no time to correct for through manual
| intervention. e.g. hitting a cyclist because the autonomous
| system made an erroneous assertion.
|
| Here's another way of looking at this: if you're in a self-
| driving car, are you a passenger or a driver? Do you intend
| to drive the car yourself or let the car transport you to
| your destination?
|
| In the unassisted scenario, it's clear that both intentions
| are one and the same. If you want to get to your location,
| you can't but drive the car yourself. Therefore you can't but
| assume full personal responsibility for your driving. Can the
| same be said about a vehicle that's specifically designed and
| marketed as "self-driving" and "autonomous"?
|
| As a driver, you don't just relinquish part of the decision
| making process to the car, what essentially happens is that
| you put your trust in how the machine learning processes that
| steer the car were taught to perceive the world by their
| manufacturer. So, if both car and occupant disagree and the
| ensuing result is an accident, who's at fault? The car? The
| occupant? The manufacturer? Or the person seeking damages
| because their dog ended up wounded?
|
| The issue here isn't that self-driving cars are inherently
| more dangerous then their "dumb" counter parts. It's that
| driving a self-driving car creates it's own separate class of
| liabilities and questions regarding responsible driving when
| accidents do happen.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| I remember reading Donald Norman's books _decades_ ago, and one
| of the prime examples of the dangers of automation in cars was
| adaptive cruise control- which would then suddenly accelerate
| forward in a now-clear off-ramp, surprising the heck out of the
| previously-complacent driver, and leading to accidents.
|
| We've known for a very long time that this sort of
| automation/manual control handoff failure is a very big deal,
| and yet there seems to be an almost willful blindness from the
| manufacturers to address it in a meaningful way.
| [deleted]
| swiley wrote:
| We have an education problem. People have no idea what
| computers do because they're illiterate (literacy would mean
| knowing at least one language well enough to read and write in
| it) so they just take other people's word that they can do some
| magical thing with software updates. The most extreme examples
| of this were the iPhone hoaxes telling people that software
| updates provided waterproofing or microwave charging.
| backtoyoujim wrote:
| I mean there are videos of a vehicle's occupant sitting in the
| rear seats making food and drinks while the vehicles are
| tricked into operating off of the vehicles sensors.
|
| It is not solely the trust and dependence but inclusive is the
| group of idiots with access to wealth without regard to human
| life.
| bishoprook2 wrote:
| I expect that to design self-driving you need to push the
| limits (with some accidents) a bit with a bunch of telemetry.
| Going from not-much to full-self-driving requires a lot of
| design increments.
| supperburg wrote:
| Lex Fridman said they studied this and found that people don't
| become "lulled" even after using the system for a long period
| of time.
| phoe18 wrote:
| > "The involved subject vehicles were all confirmed to have been
| engaged in either Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control
| during the approach to the crashes,"
|
| No mention of the deceptive marketing name "Full Self Driving" in
| the article.
| xeromal wrote:
| I'm pretty sure because FSD is out to a limited number of users
| at the moment. I think it totals around a 1000.
| kube-system wrote:
| This is just more evidence of the confusion that Tesla
| marketing has created. "Full Self-Driving Capability" is the
| literally quoted option they've been selling for years now.
| rvz wrote:
| Exactly. Some of these cars do not even have 'Driver
| Monitoring', which means the car doesn't even track if the
| driver has their _eyes on the road_ at all times, which puts
| many other drivers at risk.
|
| On top of that, FSD is still admittedly Level 2; Not exactly
| 'Full Self Driving'? And the controls can easily be tricked to
| think that the driver has their 'hands on the wheel' which is
| not enough to determine driver attentiveness while FSD is
| switched on.
| dmix wrote:
| I checked the website and they seem to be contextualizing
| "Full-self driving" with it coming at a future date:
|
| > All new Tesla cars have the hardware needed in the future for
| full self-driving in almost all circumstances. [...] As these
| self-driving capabilities are introduced, your car will be
| continuously upgraded through over-the-air software updates.
|
| https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/autopilot
|
| I also personally would prefer they stuck to 'autopilot' and
| avoided the word full in 'full self-driving' and otherwise be
| more specific about what it means.
|
| Other car companies typically productize the various features
| like lane assist, following cruise control, etc rather than
| bundle it into one. But that definitely makes communicating it
| more difficult.
|
| Tesla probably doesn't want to call it 'limited self-driving'
| or 'partial self-driving'. Maybe 'computer assisted driving'
| but that doesn't sound as appealing. I can see the difficulty
| marketing here. But again not using 'full' as in it's complete
| and ready-to-go would help.
| joewadcan wrote:
| This will end up being a very good thing for Tesla. They were
| able to operate semi-autonomous vehicles for years while they
| iterated through software versions. They are faaar from done, but
| a likely outcome will be more stringent regulation on companies
| that want to do a similar approach of putting the betas in
| customers hands. This makes it way harder for automotive
| companies to get the same leeway, putting Tesla further ahead.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| This is good for Bitcoin
| dotdi wrote:
| Unfortunately the article doesn't mention anything about how
| common it is for human drivers to crash into first responder
| vehicles during the night. I'm not trying to downplay these
| cases, as hitting emergency vehicles is very bad indeed, yet ~4
| such crashes per year might be in the same ballpark or even
| better than "unassisted" drivers that cause such crashes.
| josefx wrote:
| Might be around 98 a year if this[1] is the correct list.
|
| Edit: I think the page count at the bottom of that list is off,
| it seems to repeat the last page so it might be less.
|
| [1]https://www.respondersafety.com/news/struck-by-
| incidents/?da...
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Considering that less than 0.3% of cars in the US are Teslas
| and that - I would guess - less than 10% of them are using
| autopilot at any given time - they are likely 100s of times
| more likely to hit first responders.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Also doesn't mention that this is an inherent limitation in
| TACC+ systems, and is specifically called out as such in Volvo,
| BMW, and Cadillac vehicle manuals as a limitation. Much ado
| about nothing unless regulators are going to outlaw radar based
| adaptive cruise control (which, of course, they're not).
| btbuildem wrote:
| Indeed! I was looking for the same comparison.
|
| In Canada the Highway Act states that you must move over
| (change lanes) for stopped emergency vehicles. It seems to
| solve that problem gracefully, leaving an empty lane between
| the stopped vehicles and traffic.
| salawat wrote:
| frankly, it's hard to even crash into an emerfency in my
| opinion while actually driving snd paying attention given tgeir
| lights have gotten so darn bright it's damn near blinding.
| frankly, I have to slow to a crawl not out of rubbernecking
| fascination, butout of self preservation to adapt to the dang
| lighting searing my retinas at night.
|
| now running into unlit emergency vehicles? still think tgat's
| rather difficult sans inebriation or sleep dep.
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| the lights are actually what cause the crash. Some drivers
| just drive straight into the lights. This is part of why
| police, at least around here, have particular protocols
| around how far they stop behind a car, and never standing
| between the cop car and the car they stopped.
| mshumi wrote:
| Judging by the lack of a market reaction this morning, this is
| mostly immaterial.
| bathtub365 wrote:
| The NASDAQ wasn't open at the time of your comment, so how can
| you even make that determination?
|
| TSLA is down almost 2% in pre-market trading at the time of
| this comment, though.
| phpnode wrote:
| Stocks like Tesla have long been divorced from business
| realities so I wouldn't put too much stake in that
| smallhands wrote:
| time to short Tesla stocks!
| phpnode wrote:
| Markets and irrationality and solvency quote goes here
| rvz wrote:
| Well I did give a NKLA short 17 days ago and well I ended
| up laughing all the way to the bank. [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996773
| phpnode wrote:
| Fortune favours the brave, occasionally!
| catillac wrote:
| I don't know much about trading, but it appears to be down
| nearly 5% this morning as of right now. Regardless, I think
| you're conflating trading price with whether something is
| material in general.
| darkerside wrote:
| Long overdue. We're going to need a more rapid and iterative way
| to do this if we got to have even a chance of autopilot type
| technologies succeeding over the long run. Companies and
| regulators need to be collecting feedback and pushing for
| improvement on a regular basis. I still don't think it's likely
| to succeed, but if it did, this would be the way.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I always see anecdotes about Tesla crashes, but not any
| statistics vs other cars. I tend to assume that this is because
| they aren't more dangerous.
| catillac wrote:
| My thought would be that we hear lots of anecdotes because they
| claim a full self driving capability, so it's particularly
| interesting when they crash and are using these assist
| features. Indeed when I bought my Model Y I paid extra for that
| capability.
|
| Here's more detail: https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot
| crubier wrote:
| Predictable outcome of a sensing system fully based on deep
| learning. Rare unusual situations don't have enough training data
| and lead to unpredictable output.
|
| I still think that Tesla's approach is the right one, I just
| think they need to gather more data before letting this product
| be used in the wild unsupervised.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Current TACC/auto-steer doesn't use deep learning except on the
| newest Model 3/Y vehicles with "TeslaVision". All cars with
| radar use the radar and radar only to determine if they should
| stop for the following car.
| laichzeit0 wrote:
| How does TeslaVision work with stationary objects at night?
| Like say a big ass truck with its lights off? Do you just
| pray the vision system recognizes "something" is there? I
| know they want to pursue a pure-vision system with no radar
| input, but it seems like there will be some crazy low light /
| low visibility edge cases you'd have to deal with.
| marvin wrote:
| How does a human detect a big ass truck with its lights off
| at night? This is solvable with computer vision. Tesla's
| dataset is almost nothing but edge cases, and they keep
| adding more all the time. My money says they'll get there.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Definitely use cameras as well to determine stopping.
| Otherwise there wouldn't have been the issue with bridges or
| shadows causing phantom braking.
| 360walk wrote:
| I think it is necessary for the crashes to occur, to gather the
| data required to re-train the auto-pilot. We as a society need
| to decide whether we want to pay this cost of technological
| advancement.
| crubier wrote:
| No. Gathering data of human drivers braking in those
| circumstances would result in a perfectly fine dataset. This
| idea of needing human sacrifice is bonkers.
| thoughtstheseus wrote:
| Ban human driving on the interstate, highways, etc. Boom, self
| driving now works at scale.
| tacobelllover99 wrote:
| Man Tesla are the wrose. Causing more crashes and more likely to
| catch on fire!
|
| Oh wait NM that's tradional ICE cars.
|
| FUD is dangerous
| zebnyc wrote:
| I was excited to read about Tesla's "autopilot" until I read the
| details. To me as a consumer, autopilot would let me get in my
| car after dinner in SF, set the destination as Las Vegas and wake
| up in the morning at Vegas. Wake me up when that exists.
|
| Or I can tell my car, "Hey tesla, go pickup my kid from soccer
| practice" and it would know what to do.
| MonadIsPronad wrote:
| Oopsie. This strikes me as perhaps one of the growing pains of
| not-quite-self-driving: common sense would dictate that manual
| control would be taken by the driver when approaching an unusual
| situation like a roadside incident, but we just can't trust the
| common sense of a minority of people.
|
| Tesla perhaps isn't being loud enough about how autopilot isn't
| self-driving, and _shouldn 't even be relied upon to hit the
| brakes when something is in front of you_.
| ghaff wrote:
| What on earth makes you think it's the minority of people who
| stop paying attention when machinery is handling some task all
| by itself the vast majority of the time? There's plenty of
| research that says otherwise even among highly-trained
| individuals.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| I remember that video "driver is only there because of regulatory
| rules". That is a flat out lie, safe to say so by now. The
| autopilot accidents per distance is also cherry picked, turn on
| autopilot everywhere , including bad weather and see how that
| comparison goes. And the claim that the cars have all the
| hardware for future fsd is quite out there too. It's a bit like
| saying I have the next Michael Phelps here, he just cannot swim
| yet.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I remember when Google was first presenting on driverless
| technology about 10 years ago, and they mentioned how you have to
| go right to full self driving, because any advanced driver
| assistance will clash with human risk compensation behavior.
|
| Risk compensation is fascinating; driving with a bike helmet
| causes the biker and drivers around the biker to behave more
| dangerously.
|
| Is society sophisticated enough to deal with advanced driver
| assistance? Is it possible to gather enough data to create self
| driving ML systems?
| WA wrote:
| > Risk compensation is fascinating; driving with a bike helmet
| causes the biker and drivers around the biker to behave more
| dangerously.
|
| Do you have a truly reliable source for that? Because I hear
| this statement once in a while, and it feels flawed.
|
| A helmet protects you from severe head injury if you are in an
| accident. There are more reasons for accidents than reckless
| car drivers. For example:
|
| - Bad weather
|
| - Driver not seeing the biker at all (no matter with or without
| helmet)
|
| - Crash between 2 cyclists
| xsmasher wrote:
| Parent did not say that helmets make you less safe. They said
| that helmets make drivers around the biker behave more
| dangerously.
|
| https://www.bicycling.com/news/a25358099/drivers-give-
| helmet...
| brandmeyer wrote:
| 3.5 inches on an average of ~1 meter was the measurement,
| in a study that a single researcher performed using himself
| as the rider.
|
| This result is both weakly supported and small, and it
| shouldn't be considered actionable.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Risk compensation probably also works the other way, looking
| forward to all news cars standard supplied with a new safety
| device that cuts traffic accidents to a small fraction of what
| they used to be, the only ones remaining are all fatal for the
| driver.
|
| A nice and _very_ sharp 8 " stainless steel spike on the
| steering wheel facing the driver.
| toast0 wrote:
| > A nice and very sharp 8" stainless steel spike on the
| steering wheel facing the driver.
|
| Didn't we have those in the 50s and 60s? Maybe not sharp, but
| collapsable steering columns are a significant improvement to
| survivability.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > Risk compensation is fascinating; driving with a bike helmet
| causes the biker and drivers around the biker to behave more
| dangerously.
|
| Source please
| bllguo wrote:
| I remember reading that viewpoint in this essay:
| https://cyclingtips.com/2018/11/commentary-why-i-stopped-
| wea...
|
| there are some sources and studies linked. i.e. countries
| with the highest rate of helmet use also have the highest
| cyclist fatality rates
| xsznix wrote:
| Here you go:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014.
| ..
|
| https://psyarxiv.com/nxw2k
| barbazoo wrote:
| I cannot open the study in the first link but the second on
| seems to actually refute the claim instead of supporting
| it.
|
| > There is a body of research on how driver behaviour might
| change in response to bicyclists' appearance. In 2007,
| Walker published a study suggesting motorists drove closer
| on average when passing a bicyclist if the rider wore a
| helmet, potentially increasing the risk of a collision.
| Olivier and Walter re-analysed the same data in 2013 and
| claimed helmet wearing was not associated with close
| vehicle passing.
| xsmasher wrote:
| Keep reading.
|
| > We then present a new analysis of the original dataset,
| measuring directly the extent to which drivers changed
| their behaviour in response to helmet wearing. This
| analysis confirms that drivers did, overall, get closer
| when the rider wore a helmet.
| sidibe wrote:
| Glad the regulators are looking into this. It bothers me that now
| Tesla seems to have no liability at all for the system not
| working, since it's always the driver's fault for not paying
| enough attention.
|
| As Teslas get better at driving the drivers will be paying less
| attention inevitably, Tesla needs to start being responsible at
| some point
| bob33212 wrote:
| Every year young drivers die because they were inexperienced
| and didn't realize they were going too fast to too slow for a
| certain situation.
|
| Once full self driving is statistically safer than humans how
| will you not let people use it? It is like saying you would
| rather have 10 children die because of bad driving skills
| rather than 1 child die because they were not paying attention
| at all times.
| sidibe wrote:
| >Once full self driving is statistically safer than humans
| how will you not let people use it?
|
| I'm fine with self-driving if/when it works (though I'm
| pretty sure from watching FSD Beta videos shot and edited by
| their biggest fans with a few interventions every 5 minutes,
| this is many many many years away for Tesla). But the company
| selling the self driving has to be responsible to some degree
| for the mistakes it makes.
| WA wrote:
| And responsible for the marketing it puts out:
|
| https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-
| hardware...
|
| "... HE IS NOT DOING ANYTHING. THE CAR IS DRIVING ITSELF."
|
| Online since 2016, debunked as a lie. Still on Tesla's
| website.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| As far as that goes if we want to save lives we can just
| regulate that semi-autonomous cars have to enforce the speed
| limit + 0 visibility from fog and heavy rain is an automatic
| pull over and wait for conditions to improve.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| _Just_ statistically safer won't cut it - it will have to me
| many orders of magnitude safer. Instead of drunk people and
| mobile phone users dying it will be random accidents that
| humans would easily have avoided but is some weird edge case
| for the ML model. It'll be a cars plowing down kids on trikes
| on a clear day, all captured in perfect HD on the cars
| cameras and in the press the next day with the crying driver
| blaming the car.
|
| That'll be a hard thing to overcome for the public. The drunk
| person "had it coming", but did little Timmy?
| zugi wrote:
| Teslas are the safest vehicles on the road, according to the
| National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
| (https://drivemag.com/news/how-safe-are-tesla-cars-5-facts-
| an...).
|
| Teslas crash 40% less than other cars, and 1/3 the number of
| people are killed in Teslas versus other cars.
|
| Indeed once a common failure mode like this is identified it
| needs to be investigated and fixed. Something similar happened a
| few years ago when someone driving a Tesla while watching a movie
| (not paying attention) died when they crashed into a light-
| colored tractor trailer directly crossing the road. So an
| investigation makes sense. But much of the general criticism of
| self-driving and autopilot here seems misplaced. Teslas and other
| self-driving vehicle technologies are saving lives. They will
| continue to save lives compared to human drivers, as long as we
| let them.
| derbOac wrote:
| I really wrestle with this line of reasoning. Tesla keeps
| pointing this out, and it's appealing to me, but at the same
| time something about it seems off to me. I can't tell if this
| is erroneous intuition on my part blinding me to a more
| rational assessment, or if that intuition is onto something
| important.
|
| Some top-of-my-head thoughts:
|
| 1. I think to make a fair comparison of Tesla versus other
| cars, you'd have to really ask "how much safer are _Tesla
| owners_ in Teslas compared to other cars randomly assigned to
| them? " That is, comparing the accident rates of Teslas
| compared to other cars is misleading because Tesla owners are
| not a random slice of the population. I almost guarantee that
| if you e.g., looked at their accident rates prior to owning a
| Tesla their accident rates would be lower than the general
| population.
|
| 2. In these autopilot situations, bringing up general accident
| rates seems sort of like a red herring to me. The actual
| causally relevant issue is "what would happen in this scenario
| if someone were driving without an autopilot?" So, for example,
| in the example of the rider who was killed when the autopilot
| drove them into a semi, the actually relevant question is "what
| would have happened if that driver, or someone interchangeable
| with them, was driving without autopilot? Would have they drove
| themselves into a semi?"
|
| 3. Various experts have argued general vehicle accident rates
| aren't comparable to Teslas because average cars are much, much
| older. As such, you should be comparing accident rates of cars
| of the same age, if nothing else. So, aside from the driver
| effect pointed out earlier, you have the question of "what
| would the accident rate look like in a Tesla or a car identical
| to it without autopilot?"
|
| 4. At some point with autopilot -- whether it be Tesla or other
| companies -- you have to start treating it comparably to a
| single individual. So, for example, what are the odds of Person
| A27K38, driving the same number of miles as Tesla, having a
| certain pattern of accidents? If you found a specific person
| drove into first responders on the side of the road 11 times,
| wouldn't that be suggestive of a pattern? Or would it? It's not
| enough to ask "how often do non autopilot drivers drive into
| first responders on the side of the road", it seems to me
| important to ask "how often would a _single driver_ drive into
| first responders on the side of the road, given a certain
| number of miles driven in that same period? " At some point,
| autopilot becomes a driver, in the sense it has a unique
| identity regardless of how many copies of it there are? Maybe
| that's not right but it seems like that is the case.
| sunshineforever wrote:
| I wonder, how does the autopilot safety record compare to driving
| in similar conditions to those which AP is typically used (open
| highway, good weather).
| tyingq wrote:
| The crash in the city of Woodlands, Texas, was pretty terrifying.
| After hitting a tree, the car caught on fire. The driver was
| found in the back seat, presumably because he couldn't figure out
| how to open the door to get out.
| Meekro wrote:
| Interesting! When HN discussed that story a few months ago[1],
| the common notion was that the driver had enabled autopilot and
| climbed into the back seat.
|
| Your take seems a lot more plausible.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26869962
| tyingq wrote:
| That discussion was because the local sheriff's office said
| that there was nobody in the drivers seat at the time of
| impact. No idea why they would have said that. Tesla says the
| steering wheel was deformed in a manner consistent with a
| person being in the driver's seat when it crashed.
| bishoprook2 wrote:
| I just read about that after your post. Even with the typical
| lawyer hyperbole it's pretty bad.
|
| It seems to me that Tesla door handles (in a world where
| they've been designing door latches for some time) are just
| plain ridiculous and likely unreliable but are a side effect of
| the market the company has been selling into. Gadgets go a long
| way with Tesla owners.
|
| Obviously, things like a latch should not only work under all
| conditions including no-power, but they should probably be the
| same under all conditions. 'Emergency' latches aren't going to
| be used during an emergency as muscle memory is too important.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| I drive a lot across Europe: as in, really a lot, long trip
| across several countries, several times a year. I drive enough on
| the highways to know a few scary situations, like the truck
| driver in a big curve slightly deviating out of his lane and
| "pushing" me dangerously close to the median strip for example.
|
| To me driving requires paying constant attention to the road and
| being always ready to act swiftly: I just don't understand how
| you can have a "self driving car but you must but be ready to put
| your hands back on the steering wheel and your foot on the
| pedal(s)".
|
| I have nothing against many "recent" safety features, like the
| steering wheel shaking a bit if the car detects you're getting
| out of your lane without having activated your blinker. Or the
| car beginning to brake if it detects an obstacle. Or the car
| giving you a warning if there's a risk when you change lane, etc.
|
| But how can you react promptly if you're not ready? I just don't
| get this.
|
| Unless it's a fully self-driving car, without even a steering
| wheel, a car should help you focus more, not less.
| [deleted]
| zip1234 wrote:
| Also, these cars know the speed limits for the road but let you
| set cruise control/self driving above the speed limit. Seems
| like for safety purposes that should not be allowed. Not only
| are people paying significantly less attention but they also
| are speeding.
| Sargos wrote:
| Going slower than traffic is actually unsafe and increases
| the chances of collisions with other drivers.
| zip1234 wrote:
| Going slower than traffic happens all the time. Over the
| road trucks often have speed governors set to 60-70 mph for
| example.
| filoleg wrote:
| That's a feature accommodating realities of driving on public
| roads, not a bug.
|
| If you drive on a 60mph speed limit highway, no one is
| driving 60mph, everyone is going around 70mph. If you decide
| to use autopilot and it limits you to 60mph, you
| singlehandedly start disrupting the flow of traffic (that
| goes 70mph) and end up becoming an increased danger to
| yourself and others.
|
| Not even mentioning cases when the speed limits change
| overnight or the map data is outdated or if a physical sign
| is unreadable.
| zip1234 wrote:
| Over the road trucks often have speed governors, some
| companies limit their trucks to 60 mph because it saves a
| lot of fuel and leads to a much (50%) lower risk of
| collisions.
| filoleg wrote:
| Apples to oranges. Stopping distance of a 16-wheeler is
| magnitudes larger than that of a typical sedan, so in
| their case it makes sense.
|
| For specific numbers (after subtracting reaction distance
| being the same for both):
|
| 55mph: car 165ft, 16-wheeler 225ft. 65mph: car 245ft,
| 16-wheeler 454ft.
|
| As you can see, the gap between a car's stopping distance
| and a 16-wheeler's stopping distance increases with speed
| increasing, and non-linearly at that. Not even mentioning
| the destructive potential of a car vs. a 16-wheeler.
|
| I would agree with your point if majority of the roads
| were occupied by 16-wheelers, but it isn't the case (at
| least in the metro area that I commute to work in).
|
| Source for numbers used:
| https://trucksmart.udot.utah.gov/motorist-home/stopping-
| dist...
|
| Note: I agree that it would be safer if everyone drove
| the exact speed limit, as opposed to everyone going 10mph
| above the speed limit. However, in a situation where
| everyone is driving 10mph above the speed limit, you are
| creating a more dangerous situation by driving 10mph
| slower instead of driving 10mph above like everyone else.
| aembleton wrote:
| > Also, these cars know the speed limits for the road
|
| Does it always get this correct, or does it sometimes read a
| 30mph sign on a side road and then slow the car on the
| motorway down to that speed?
| zip1234 wrote:
| I'm not sure how the cars know the speed limit. Maybe
| someone else knows? My guess is combo of GPS/camera to
| position correctly on road and the lookup of known speed
| limit data. Perhaps it reads signs though?
| cranekam wrote:
| The rental car I am using now certainly a) reads road
| signs for speed limit information, b) is definitely
| fooled by signs on off ramps etc.
|
| It's hard to imagine how speed limit systems would work
| without some sort of vision capabilities -- a database of
| speed limits would never be up to date with roadworks and
| so on.
| zip1234 wrote:
| Nobody should be using autopilot driving through
| roadworks anyways.
| hermitdev wrote:
| My car shows the speed limit of roads it knows. It uses
| GPS and stored limits. It also doesn't know the limits of
| non-major roads and doesn't attempt to show a limit then.
| My car is a 2013, and I've not paid the $$ to update the
| maps in that time (seriously, they want $200-$400 to
| update the maps).
|
| Since I bought my car, Illinois (where I live) has raised
| the maximum limit on interstates by 10 MPH. My car
| doesn't know about it. If my car limited me to what it
| thought the limit was, I'd probably be driving 20 MPH
| slower than prevailing traffic, a decidedly unsafe
| situation.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Different manufacturers probably use different systems but
| no. BMW attempts to read the speed limit signs using the
| frontal camera with a mix of some sort of stored info - it
| knows that the speed limit is about to change (Mobileye?),
| but it is very often that it won't catch a sign in the bend
| or when the weather is bad. Also, it does not recognize
| time restricted speed limits, for example 30kph from 7:00
| to 17:00 Monday to Friday so it would keep driving 30kph
| outside of those hours while 50kph is allowed. In some
| places in Germany, it does not recognize the city limits
| and carries on showing 70kph for a kilometer longer than it
| should.
| emerged wrote:
| Almost nobody drives at or below the speed limit. It's
| dangerous to do so in many places.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| I learned this playing Gran Turismo video games way back when.
| The game has long endurance races (I seem to remember races
| that ran about 2 hours, but there may have been longer ones).
| Eventually you get hungry or thirsty or have to use the
| bathroom, so you pause the game, take care of business, and
| resume. It's really easy to screw up if the game was paused
| while your car was doing anything other than stable, straight
| travel. A turn that I successfully handled 100 times before can
| suddenly feel foreign and challenging if I resume there with
| little context.
|
| Obviously that's not exactly the same thing as taking over for
| a real car when the driver assistance features give up, but
| seems similarly challenging to take over the controls at the
| most precarious moment of travel, without being sort of "warmed
| up" as a driver.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| 500 laps at Laguna Seca in a manual transmission car let's
| go!
| zemptime wrote:
| I see a lot of comments here postulating how autopilot is a
| terribly designed feature from people who appear not to be
| speaking from first hand experience and now I feel compelled to
| comment, exactly following that HN pattern someone posted about
| how HN discussions go. That said thanks for keeping this
| discussion focused & framed as a system design one, doesn't
| feel like a Tesla hate train so I feel comfortable hoppin' in
| and sharing. This is a little refreshing to see.
|
| Anyway, perhaps I'm in a minority here, but I feel as though my
| driving has gotten _significantly safer_ since getting a Tesla,
| particularly on longer road trips.
|
| Instead of burning energy making sure my car stays in the lane
| I can spend nearly all my time observing drivers around me and
| paying closer attention farther down the road. My preventative
| and defensive driving has gone up a level.
|
| > I just don't understand how you can have a "self driving car
| but you must but be ready to put your hands back on the
| steering wheel and your foot on the pedal(s)".
|
| I've not hit animals and dodged random things rolling/blowing
| into the road at a moment's notice. This isn't letting
| autopilot drive, it's like a hybrid act where it does the rote
| driving and I constantly take over to quickly pass a semi on a
| windy day, not pass it on a curve, or get over some lanes to
| avoid tire remnants in the road up ahead. I'm able to watch the
| traffic in front and behind and find pockets on the highway
| with nobody around me and no clumping bound to occur (<3
| those).
|
| To your suspicion, it is a different mode of driving. Recently
| I did a roadtrip (about half the height of the USA) in a non-
| Tesla, and I found myself way more exhausted and less alert
| towards the end of it. Could be I'm out of habit but egh.
|
| Anyway, so far I've been super lucky. I don't think it's
| possible to avoid all car crashes no matter how well you drive.
| But I _for sure_ have avoided avoidable ones and taken myself
| out of situations where they later occurred thanks to the extra
| mental cycles afforded to me by auto-pilot. My safety record in
| the Tesla is currently perfect and I'll try and keep it that
| way.
|
| I don't think autopilot is perfect either but I do think it's a
| good tool and I'm a better driver for it. Autopilot has
| definitely helped me spend better focus on driving.
| somerandomqaguy wrote:
| I think you two are talking about different things.
|
| You're talking about Autopilot which is just driver
| assistance technologies; lane keep assistance, adaptive
| cruise control, blind spot monitoring, etc. It's not to
| replace driver attention, it's just monitor sections of the
| road the the driver can't pay attention to full time. The
| driver is still remaining in control and attentive to the
| road.
|
| The person you're responding to seems to be talking talking
| about the Full Self Driving feature who's initial marketing
| implied that the driver need not be mentally engaged at all
| or too impaired to drive normally. Which was later back pedal
| led to say that you need to pay attention.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| There's zero Tesla hate here and certainly zero EV hate here,
| on the contrary: I just feel the interior build quality on
| the Tesla could be a bit better but I'm sure they'll get
| there.
|
| I wouldn't want my, strangely enough upvoted a lot, comment,
| to be mistaken for Tesla hate. I like what they're doing. I
| just think the auto-pilot shouldn't give a false sense of
| security.
|
| > I've not hit animals and dodged random things
| rolling/blowing into the road at a moment's notice.
|
| > I don't think it's possible to avoid all car crashes no
| matter how well you drive.
|
| Same here... And animals are my worst nightmare: there are
| videos on YouTube just terrifying.
|
| For I do regularly watch crash videos to remind me of some of
| the dangers on the road.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| What I always tell people is that together me and my car
| drive better than either of us on their own (Tesla Model S
| 70D, 2015, AP1.5).
| malwrar wrote:
| This expresses the mindset I find myself in when I use
| Autopilot. It's like enabling cruise control, you're still
| watching traffic around you but now you don't need to focus
| on maintaining the correct speed _or_ worry about keeping
| your car perfectly in a lane. You can more or less let the
| car handle that (with your hands on the wheel to guard
| against the occasional jerky maneuver when a lane widens for
| example) while you focus on the conditions around you.
| somedude895 wrote:
| Exactly this. I treat AP like I'm letting a learner drive.
| Constantly observing to make sure it's doing the right
| thing. I've been on long road trips and with AP my mind
| stays fresh for much longer compared to with other cars.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Exactly. It frees the driver from increasingly advanced
| levels of mundane driving (cruise control manages just
| speed, adaptive cruise also deals with following distance,
| lane keeping deals with most of the steering input, etc)
| allowing the driver to focus more on monitoring the
| situation and strategic portion of driving rather than the
| tactical. Of course, this relies on the driver to actually
| do that. They could just use devote that extra attention to
| their phone.
| scrumbledober wrote:
| my 2021 Subaru Forester does all of these things and I do
| feel like I am safer with them on and paying attention to
| the rest of driving.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| The problem is, even if your subjective idea of how Autopilot
| affects your own driving is correct, it appears not to be the
| case for a significant subset of Tesla drivers, enough that
| they've been plowing into emergency vehicles at such an
| elevated rate as to cause NHTSA to open an investigation.
|
| Also, your subjective impressions may be what they are simply
| because you have not yet encountered the unlucky set of
| conditions which would radically change your view, as was
| surely the case for all the drivers involved in these sorts
| of incidents.
| gugagore wrote:
| Some people activate cruise control and then rest their right
| foot on the floor. I activate cruise control whenever
| possible because while it is activated, I can drive with my
| foot resting on the brake pedal. I like being marginally more
| responsive to an event that requires braking since I don't
| need to move my foot from the accelerator.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| The most useful button on my car is the speed limiter.
| Everything else can go.
| comeonseriously wrote:
| I agree with everything you said. I do hope that eventually the
| tech gets to the point where it can take over full time. We
| recently took a road trip for our vacation and the amount of
| road rage we witnessed was ... mind boggling. Don't get me
| wrong, not everyone is a raging asshole, but there were enough
| to make me wonder just why so many people are so freaking
| angry.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > But how can you react promptly if you're not ready? I just
| don't get this.
|
| You cannot, that's the simple truth. You're supposed to focus
| on the road anyways and should be able to take over once any
| sort of autopilot or assist system starts working erroneously,
| yet in practice many people simply assume that those systems
| being there in the first place mean that you can simply stop
| focusing on the road altogether.
|
| It feels like the claim of "fully self driving vehicle" is at
| odds with actual safety, or at least will remain so until the
| technology actually progresses far enough to be on average
| safer than human drivers, moral issues aside. Whether that will
| take 15, 50 or 500 years, i cannot say, however.
|
| That said, currently such functionality could be good enough
| for the driver to take a sip from a drink, or fiddle around
| with a message on their phone, or even mess around on the
| navigation system or the radio - things that would get done
| regardless because people are irresponsible, but making which a
| little bit safer is feasible.
| [deleted]
| cma wrote:
| I feel like driver monitoring can keep it safe, and should
| even be available without autopilot enabled.
|
| Comma.ai makes the monitoring more strict when the system is
| less certain or when in denser traffic.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's nothing (well certainly not everything) to do with
| people's assumptions. There's a ton of research around how
| people simply stop paying attention when there's no reason
| for them to pay attention 99% of the time. It doesn't even
| need to be about them pulling out a book or watching a movie.
| It can simply be zoning out.
|
| Maybe, as you say, it's feasible today or soon to better
| handle brief distractions but once you allow that it's
| probably dangerous to assume that people won't stretch out
| those distractions.
| Retric wrote:
| We have empirical data showing how safe actual level 2 self
| driving cars are in practice. So there's no reason to work
| from base assumptions. Yes, level 2 self driving cars cause
| avoidable accidents, but overall rate is very close to the
| rate people do. The only way that's happing is they are
| causing and preventing roughly similar numbers of
| accidents.
|
| Which means people are either paying enough attention or
| these self driving systems are quite good. My suspicion is
| it's a mix of both, where people tend to zone out in less
| hazardous driving conditions and start paying attention
| when things start looking dangerous. Unfortunately, that's
| going to cause an equilibrium where people pay less
| attention as these systems get better.
| Brakenshire wrote:
| > We have empirical data showing how safe actual level 2
| self driving cars are in practice.
|
| Do we? Where does that come from? The data Tesla provides
| is hopelessly non-representative because it makes the
| assumption that the safety of any given road is
| independent of whether a driver chooses to switch on the
| system there.
| Retric wrote:
| Only overall numbers actually mater here, if self driving
| is off then that's just the default risk from human
| driving in those conditions. Talk to your insurance
| company, they can give you a break down by make, model,
| and trim levels.
| SpelingBeeChamp wrote:
| I am pretty sure that if I call Geico they will not
| provide me with those data. Am I wrong?
| Retric wrote:
| Mine did, but I don't use Geico. If they don't give you
| the underlying data you can at least compare rates to
| figure out relative risks.
| Faaak wrote:
| To me they are really aids. Of course you keep being
| concentrated, but I found that it takes out a lot of mental
| load like keeping the car straight, constantly tweaking the
| accelerator, etc..
|
| It just makes the trips easier on the brain, and thus, for me,
| safer overall: its easier to see the overall situation when
| you've got free mental capacity
| kbshacker wrote:
| Exactly, the only driving assistance feature I use is adaptive
| cruise control, and I don't have plans to use anything more. If
| I trust autonomous systems too much, I would not be ready when
| it matters.
| pedrocr wrote:
| I drive a Tesla and don't use the self-steering feature exactly
| because of this. What I do instead is enable the warnings from
| the same software like the ones you describe. That is actually
| a large gain. I'm already paying attention as I'm driving the
| car at all times and the software helps me catch things I
| haven't noticed for some reason. Those features seem really
| well done as the false positives are not too frequent and just
| a nuisance but the warnings are often valuable.
| oblio wrote:
| Does it have/use emergency braking in case of danger, if you
| don't use self-driving?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Yes but they are phasing out radar in favor of vision-only.
| Model 3 and Y have been shipping without radar braking for
| the past few months.
| wilg wrote:
| They still do emergency braking regardless of the sensor
| technology.
| nickik wrote:
| The vision-only system has passed all required tests for
| certification and Tesla themselves consider it to be a
| much safer system now.
| caf wrote:
| Yes.
| robomartin wrote:
| It is my belief that the most ideal form of truly self driving
| vehicles will not happen until a time when vehicles can talk to
| each other on the road to make each other aware of position and
| speed data. I don't think this has to be full GPS coordinates
| at all. This is about short range relative position
| information.
|
| A mesh network of vehicles on the road would add the ability
| for vehicles to become aware of far more than a human driver
| can ever know. For example, if cars become aware of a problem a
| few km/miles ahead, they can all adjust speed way before
| encountering the constriction in order to optimize for traffic
| flow (or safety, etc.).
|
| Of course, this does not adequately deal with pedestrians,
| bikes, pets, fallen trees, debris on the road, etc.
|
| Not saying cars would exclusively use the mesh network as the
| sole method for navigation, they have to be highly capable
| without it. The mesh network would be an enhancement layer. On
| highways this would allow for optimization that would bring
| forth some potentially nice benefits. For example, I can
| envision reducing emissions through traffic flow optimization.
|
| Remember that electric cars still produce emissions, just not
| necessarily directly while driving. The energy has to come from
| somewhere and, unless we build a massive number of nuclear
| plants, that somewhere will likely include a significant
| percentage of coal and natural gas power plants.
|
| The timeline for this utopia is likely in the 20+ year range. I
| say this because of the simple reality of car and truck
| ownership. People who are buying cars today are not going to
| dispose of them in ten years. A car that is new today will
| likely enter into the used market in 8 to 10 years and be
| around another 5 to 10. The situation is different with
| commercial vehicles. Commercial trucks tend to have longer
| service lives by either design or maintenance. So, yeah, 20 to
| 30 years seems reasonable.
| mhb wrote:
| Yes. This also makes me kind of nervous when just using normal
| car adaptive cruise control. I feel as though my foot needs to
| be hovering near the pedal anyway and that's often less
| comfortable than actually pushing on the pedal and controlling
| it myself.
| hnarn wrote:
| > like the truck driver in a big curve slightly deviating out
| of his lane and "pushing" me dangerously close to the median
| strip for example
|
| This is a situation that you simply shouldn't put yourself in.
| There is no reason to ever drive right next to a large vehicle,
| on either side, except for very short periods when overtaking
| them on a straight road.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| This just isn't realistically possible on most highways
| except in the lightest traffic conditions. You are gonna
| spend some time beside trucks whether you like it or not.
| hnarn wrote:
| Spending time right next to a truck is completely optional.
| You can either speed up or slow down, either of them will
| put you in a position where you are no longer right next to
| them.
| occamrazor wrote:
| What if there is a more or less uninterrupted row of
| trucks in the right lane?
| hnarn wrote:
| We can play "what if" all day, but I'm not interested. In
| 99,9% of cases you can and should avoid driving next to a
| large vehicle.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| These are exactly my arguments to my girlfriend on why she
| shouldn't use the Autopilot on our Tesla. Your mind will stray,
| the feature is exactly meant to do that to you. The feedback
| loop goes the wrong way. Then boom you don't see emergency
| vehicles at a wreck apparently. I do blame Elon, he did the
| Silicon Valley thing of just promise a lot of untested stuff
| before the laws have solidified. Uber, Lime scooters, etc. The
| Tesla is a great car, but self-driving is orders of magnitude
| harder than he thinks.
| jays wrote:
| Agreed. I'd also add that other car manufacturers have made
| tradeoffs on safety issues for decades.
|
| So I wonder if it's more about Telsa capitalizing on the hype
| of self driving cars (with the expensive self-driving add-on)
| in the short term and less about him misunderstanding the
| magnitude of difficulty.
|
| Telsa is using the proceeds from that add-on to make them
| seem more profitable and fund the actual development. It's
| smart in some aspects, but very risky to consumers and Telsa.
| ghaff wrote:
| If you go back a few years, there were clearly expectations
| being set around L4/5 self-driving that that have very
| clearly not been met.
|
| I still wonder to what degree this was a collective
| delusion based on spectacular but narrow gains mostly
| related to supervised learning in machine vision, how much
| was fake it till you make it, and how much was pure
| investor/customer fleecing.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| It can be really jarring too when a car behaves differently
| than you expect: I regularly use cruise control on my Kia,
| which makes driving much less stressful. It keeps the car
| centered in the lane, more or less turns the car with the road,
| and of course, matches the speed of the car in front of it with
| reasonable stopping distance. I wouldn't call it "self-driving"
| by any means, but if not for the alert that gets ticked off if
| your hands are off the wheel too long, it'd probably go on it's
| own for quite a long time without an incident.
|
| However, I also once so far have experienced what happens when
| this system experiences a poorly-marked construction zone.
| Whilst most construction sites on the interstate system place
| temporary road lines for lane shifts, this one solely used
| cones. While I was paying attention and never left the flow of
| traffic, the car actually fought a little bit against me
| following the cones into another lane, because it didn't see
| the cones, it was following the lines.
|
| It doesn't surprise me at all that if someone gets too
| comfortable trusting the car to do the work, even if they
| _think_ they 're paying attention, they could get driven off
| the roadway.
| hermitdev wrote:
| I was thinking about this the other day - driving in
| construction. The town I live in is currently doing water
| main replacement. So, lots of torn up roads, closed lanes and
| even single-lane only with a flagger alternating directions.
| No amount of safety cones will make it obvious what's going
| on.
|
| How do automated systems deal with flaggers? Visibility of
| the stop/slow sign isn't sufficient to make a determination
| on whether it's safe to proceed (not to mention "stop"
| changes meaning here, entirely, from a typical stop sign).
| Often, whether or not you can proceed comes down to hand
| gestures from the flagger proper.
|
| Not that I expect any reasonable driver to be using something
| like autopilot through such a situation, but we've also seen
| plenty of evidence that there are unreasonable drivers
| currently using these systems, as well.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Conceivably in the somewhat-near future (10 years+), most
| cars on the road will have some sort of ADAS system, in
| which I'd presume it'd start to make sense for construction
| to use some sort of digital signalling. Something like a
| radio signal broadcast that can send basic slow/stop
| flagging signals to a lane of traffic.
|
| Of course, the problem is, if we haven't developed it
| today, the ADAS systems of today won't understand it in ten
| years when there's enough saturation to be practical to use
| it. Apart from Tesla, very few car manufacturers are
| reckless enough to send OTA updates that can impact driving
| behavior.
|
| Lane-following ADAS systems of today, mind you, can work
| relatively fine in construction areas... provided lane
| lines are moved, as opposed to relying solely on traffic
| cones.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Fully automated Self driving cars is either a pipe dream or
| decades away in which many more people will be killed on the
| road in the name of technological progress.
| [deleted]
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Will changes such as machine-readable road markings, car to
| car communications, and traffic management systems make this
| happen quicker.
|
| For example, couldn't emergency vehicles could send out a
| signal directly to autonomous vehicles or via a traffic
| managagemnt system to slow down or require the driver to take
| over when approaching. An elementary version of this is Waze
| which will notify you of road hazards or cars stopped on the
| side of the road.
| ra7 wrote:
| Fully autonomous cars are already a reality with Waymo in AZ
| and AutoX, Baidu in China. I don't know how safe the Chinese
| companies are, but Waymo's safety record [1] is nothing short
| of stellar.
|
| [1] https://waymo.com/safety
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Waymo selected the one state willing to entirely remove any
| safety reporting requirements for self-driving cars as the
| place to launch their service. Regardless of what they
| _claim_ to the contrary, if they had confidence in their
| safety record, they would 've launched it in California,
| not Arizona.
|
| Waymo has lied about the capabilities of their technology
| regularly, and for that reason alone, should be assumed
| unsafe. A former employee expressed disappointment they
| weren't the first self-driving car company to kill someone,
| because that meant they were behind.
| ra7 wrote:
| > Regardless of what they claim to the contrary, if they
| had confidence in their safety record, they would've
| launched it in California, not Arizona.
|
| California only months ago opened up permits for paid
| robotaxi rides. So no, they couldn't have launched it in
| CA. If you've noticed, they actually are testing in SF
| with a permit.
|
| > Waymo has lied about the capabilities of their
| technology regularly, and for that reason alone, should
| be assumed unsafe.
|
| What lies? Their CA disengagement miles are for everyone
| to see, their safety report is open, they have had 0
| fatalities in their years of operation. Seems like you
| just made this up.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > California only months ago opened up permits for paid
| robotaxi rides. So no, they couldn't have launched it in
| CA.
|
| Well, yeah, that's the logic of an established business.
| Disruptive startups flout laws rather than following
| them.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I recall a particular incident where Waymo was marketing
| their car being able to drive a blind man to a drive-
| thru, way before the thing could safely drive more than a
| mile on it's own. My understanding is that in 2021, it
| still can't navigate parking lots (which would preclude
| using it for drive-thrus).
|
| Later, they were talking about how sophisticated their
| technology was: It can detect the hand signals of someone
| directing traffic in the middle of an intersection. Funny
| that a few months later, a journalist got an admission
| out of a Waymo engineer that the car wouldn't even stop
| at a stoplight unless the stoplight was explicitly mapped
| (with centimeter-level precision) so the car knew to look
| for it and where to look for the signal.
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/08/28/171520/hidden
| -ob...
|
| The article is seven years old at this point, but it's
| also incredibly humbling in how much bull- Waymo puts
| out, especially compared to the impressions their
| marketing team puts out. (Urmson's son presumably has a
| driver's license by now.)
|
| In at least one scenario, the former Waymo engineer upset
| he had failed to kill anyone yet ("I'm pissed we didn't
| have the first death"), caused a hit-and-run accident
| with a Waymo car, and didn't report it to authorities,
| amongst other serious accidents:
| https://www.salon.com/2018/10/16/googles-self-driving-
| cars-i... Said star Waymo engineer eventually went to
| prison for stealing trade secrets and then got pardoned
| by Donald Trump. Google didn't fire him for trying to
| kill people, they only really got upset with him because
| he took their tech to Uber.
|
| I'd say Waymo has a storied history of dishonesty and
| coverups, behind a technology that's more or less a
| remote control car that only runs in a narrow group of
| carefully premapped streets.
| ra7 wrote:
| > I recall a particular incident where Waymo was
| marketing their car being able to drive a blind man to a
| drive-thru, way before the thing could safely drive more
| than a mile on it's own.
|
| How is a marketing video relevant from 2015 relevant to
| their safety record? They weren't even operating a public
| robotaxi service back then.
|
| > My understanding is that in 2021, it still can't
| navigate parking lots (which would preclude using it for
| drive-thrus).
|
| Completely false. Here is one navigating a Costco parking
| lot (can't get any busier than that) [1]. If you watch
| any videos in that YouTube channel, it picks you up and
| drops you off right from the parking lot. Yes, you can't
| use it for drive-thrus, but it doesn't qualify as "lying
| about capabilities".
|
| > Later, they were talking about how sophisticated their
| technology was: It can detect the hand signals of someone
| directing traffic in the middle of an intersection. Funny
| that a few months later, a journalist got an admission
| out of a Waymo engineer that the car wouldn't even stop
| at a stoplight unless the stoplight was explicitly mapped
| (with centimeter-level precision) so the car knew to look
| for it and where to look for the signal.
|
| Here is one recognizing a handheld stop sign from a
| police officer while it stopped for an emergency vehicle
| [2].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5CXcJD3mcU
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpDbX1FViWk&t=75s
| nradov wrote:
| The workers doing road repairs in my neighborhood don't
| even use handheld stop signs. Just vague and confusing
| gestures.
| ra7 wrote:
| I think in those cases a Waymo vehicle would probably
| require remote assistance. It's a really difficult
| scenario for a computer to make sense of.
| ghaff wrote:
| Good for Waymo and hopefully Google keeps up this science
| project. But it's a very limited and almost as perfect an
| environment as you could have outside of a controlled test
| area. Those who were saying L4/5 would be decades at least
| away seem to be those who were on the right track. Kids
| growing up today are going to have to learn to drive.
| ra7 wrote:
| L5 may be decades away. I think we will see L4 in some
| major metro areas in the US by end of this decade. SF is
| heating up with Cruise and Waymo's heavy testing. Their
| progress will be a great indicator for true city driving.
| ghaff wrote:
| >we will see L4 in some major metro areas in the US by
| end of this decade
|
| I think you're far more likely to see L4 on limited
| access highways in good weather. A robotaxi service in a
| major city seems much more problematic given all the
| random behavior by other cars, pedestrians, cyclists,
| etc. and picking up/dropping off people in the fairly
| random ways that taxis/Ubers do. (And you'll rightly be
| shut down 6 months for an investigation the first time
| you run over someone even if they weren't crossing at a
| crosswalk.)
|
| And for many people, including myself, automated highway
| driving would actually be a much bigger win than urban
| taxi rides which I rarely have a need for.
| andreilys wrote:
| _which many more people will be killed on the rise in the
| name of technological progress._
|
| Seeing as car crashes are the leading cause of deaths from
| people aged 1-54, it may be an improvement from the status
| quo
|
| _More than 38,000 people die every year in crashes on U.S.
| roadways. The U.S. traffic fatality rate is 12.4 deaths per
| 100,000 inhabitants. An additional 4.4 million are injured
| seriously enough to require medical attention. Road crashes
| are the leading cause of death in the U.S. for people aged
| 1-54._
| ac29 wrote:
| > Road crashes are the leading cause of death in the U.S.
| for people aged 1-54
|
| This isnt true according to the CDC. Cancer and heart
| disease lead for the 44-54 group, and while "accidental
| injury" does lead from 1-44, if you break down the data, in
| many cases vehicle based accidents are not not the largest
| single source. For example:
|
| Drowning is the largest single cause in 1-4
|
| Cancer is the largest single cause in 5-9
|
| Suicide is the largest single cause 10-14
|
| https://wisqars-viz.cdc.gov:8006/lcd/home
| hn8788 wrote:
| I'd say it depends on how many of those deaths are caused
| by the driver doing something unsafe. I'd be more
| comfortable with higher traffic deaths that primarily
| affect bad drivers than a lower number of deaths randomly
| spread across all drivers by a blackbox algorithm.
| _ph_ wrote:
| If you are texting while driving and hit a stopped car or
| run a red light, you are very lightly to kill others.
| Actually more likely, as a side impact is more dangerous
| than a frontal one.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| But the car doesn't need to drive itself to avoid those
| factors, it just needs to have radar auto braking
| kube-system wrote:
| There are a lot of good points here in the comments already about
| the relative safety of Tesla's system compared to other vehicles
| and other automated driving system -- and I think they're
| probably right.
|
| The differentiating issue with Tesla's system is the way it is
| sold and marketed. Important operational safety information
| shouldn't be hidden in fine print. Subtly misleading marketing
| has unfortunately become acceptable in our culture, but this idea
| needs to stay out of safety-critical systems.
|
| We need a mandate for clear and standardized labelling for these
| features, a la the Monroney sticker. All manufacturers should
| have to label and market their cars with something like SAE
| J3016.
| https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/gallery/cm/articles/pre...
| kemiller wrote:
| OK people. There have been a grand total of 11 cases in 2.5
| years. NHTSA investigates a lots of things. How many regular
| drivers collided with emergency vehicles in the same time frame?
| jdavis703 wrote:
| The FBI has stats on police deaths by type of death. If memory
| serves correctly slightly more cops were killed in traffic
| crashes than that.
|
| However, I'm assuming the crashes were quite varied: anything
| from a driver recklessly fleeing a stop to some drunk crashing
| into a cop on the highway shoulder. Most likely these deaths
| didn't have a systematic pattern to them that could be
| prevented if only we knew what the root cause was.
| [deleted]
| kelvin0 wrote:
| Having human drivers and assisted drivers on the same road is
| problematic currently.
|
| I think the best situation would be to have 'automated' stretches
| of highway specially designed to 'help' self driving systems.
|
| Only self driving vehicles would be allowed on such special
| highways, and everything would be built around such systems.
| ghaff wrote:
| Who is going to pay for these dedicated stretches of highway
| that only, presumably, relatively wealthy owners of self-
| driving cars are going to be allowed to use?
| kelvin0 wrote:
| Any entity (individuals or corporate) could use it of course.
| Rich or not, since Electric vehicles such as buses could be a
| public form of transportation on these specially adapted
| roads.
| SCNP wrote:
| Let me preface by saying that I hold no strong opinions on this
| matter and my comments are purely speculative.
|
| This is kind of a position I've held for a long time but a
| different aspect of the problem. I think a system similar to
| IFF in aircraft would solve all of these issue. If every car
| knew where every other car was at all times, you could easily
| devise a system that would be nearly flawless. The issue is,
| there is no incremental path to this solution. You would
| essentially have to start over with the existing transportation
| network.
| [deleted]
| mattnewton wrote:
| The problem is that you don't just need to know about every
| other vehicle, you still need all the perceptual stuff for
| pedestrians, bikers, baby carriages, trash, road closures,
| traffic cops in the middle of the road, etc. All those things
| are arguably harder to detect reliably than a somewhat
| standard sized box of metal with pairs of lights in the front
| and back. I think shooting for superhuman perception of all
| these things is still where Tesla is failing.
| SCNP wrote:
| True. I guess I was thinking that if you build totally new
| infrastructure for these new overhauled cars, you'd keep it
| completely separate from other modes of transportation. My
| sci-fi inclinations had me imagining tubes like Logan's
| Run.
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