[HN Gopher] Tell HN: Tesla rear-ended me on autopilot, no one wi...
___________________________________________________________________
Tell HN: Tesla rear-ended me on autopilot, no one will investigate
Yesterday I was stopped at a red light on a highway and a Tesla
Model S rear ended me at high speed, twice! There were two impacts
somehow. It was a 4-car pileup and my car was destroyed. The
driver said she was using Autopilot, that an OTA update had had a
problem earlier in the day, and that she had actually had the same
kind of collision on Autopilot previously! I talked with the NTSB
who said that they won't investigate because no one was killed. I
talked with the NHTSA who said that they can't take a complaint:
only the driver can file a complaint and they will only investigate
if they "see a trend". This seems like a serious issue that
someone should be looking at. Does anyone have any idea about how
to get this actually investigated to see if it was another
Autopilot failure?
Author : raylad
Score : 274 points
Date : 2021-11-01 20:14 UTC (2 hours ago)
| elil17 wrote:
| You could ask the other driver to file a complaint - seems like
| she's not too happy with it either. You could talk to the
| inspectors general responsible for NHTSA and NTSB - they can
| investigate why those two aren't investigating.
|
| Only other option would be to sue Tesla. You'll have a claim if
| your damages aren't paid for by the other driver/her insurance
| (e.g. the damages exceed the insurance limit, so you get to sue
| either her or Tesla). However, you'd be better of financially
| suing her. If she's uninsured she could sue Tesla to cover the
| damages.
|
| Perhaps some public interest law firm would want to take up the
| case - that could make suing practical.
| oblib wrote:
| Really sorry to hear this.
|
| I really cannot see how this bullshit is allowed on our roads.
| We're all guinea pigs for this insane experiment when the truth
| is we know it cannot work well enough to not kill and maim
| people.
|
| Our government, as you've proved, is completely asleep at the
| wheel here.
| Dotnaught wrote:
| Feel free to email me: tclaburn at theregister dot com
| slownews45 wrote:
| You can see here how "journalism" runs to stuff that's not
| based on any data. 5 million + car accidents, and a probably
| total bogus retelling from someone probably not even sure what
| they were doing (ie, did she read manual?) will make it into a
| news article.
| striking wrote:
| You're assuming this will instantly be spun into a story
| based on this one anecdote. It might be used as one anecdote
| of many, it may be represented as one point of view among
| many, it may never end up becoming a story at all.
|
| "You can see here how" a journalist is choosing to
| investigate a possibly promising lead while their profession
| continues to be misunderstood.
| bryan_w wrote:
| We'll see how much "quality" we get out of tclaburn but I
| don't think it's gonna be an article full of numbers and
| facts, but rather outrage and feelings, judging by the
| "quality" that newspaper tends to produce.
| RichardHesketh wrote:
| Have you actually read any content at the register.com?
| It's often tongue in cheek, but openly so, and rarely -
| if ever - (in my experience) dishonest. Don't assume all
| media outlets and journalists are the same.
| ProAm wrote:
| How else do you expect a journalist to start an
| investigation?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Apparently all news reports must be based solely on trends
| from statistically valid publications. Ignore the fact that
| most news is of the "man bites dog" variety and not the
| "dog bites man trend decreases 3% year-over-year" variety.
| laurowyn wrote:
| So what should they do? Copy OP and publish as is with no
| follow up, investigation or additional information? or should
| they do their job and investigate a claim that could be of
| interest to the public?
|
| Not like they could get information from OP, and then make a
| FOIA request of the two departments OP mentioned to identify
| similar reports and write the facts up in an article for us
| to read, understand and decide for ourselves if it's an
| issue. That's good journalism: give the facts and let the
| public make opinions, not the current system which gives the
| opinions and let the public make up the facts. Just like this
| post, deciding it's a wide spread issue and the comments
| agreeing it is without any evidence.
| trollied wrote:
| The Register are pretty good, to be honest. They don't run
| just any old crap, and are actually technical.
| lvs wrote:
| I don't think you understand what real journalists do. Bad
| ones might perhaps just "forward" an unchallenged claim as
| your uncle does on Facebook. Journalists and editors trained
| at journalism schools have a little more integrity and
| skepticism than your uncle.
| hasdf wrote:
| Ah yes the "no true journalist" argument
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Did the local police not come out and investigate?
| raylad wrote:
| Yes, they were there and so was a fire engine. I don't think
| it's typical for police to request autopilot logs from Tesla
| though.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I'm not defending the police per-se, but I assume the local
| PD probably doesn't know how to handle such an investigation
| yet.
| [deleted]
| atdrummond wrote:
| Reach out to Jalopnik - this is right up their alley.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _The driver said she was using Autopilot, that an OTA update
| had had a problem earlier in the day, and that she had actually
| had the same kind of collision on Autopilot previously!_
|
| So she continued to use it? That's insane.
|
| It's worrying that there are tons of videos on YouTube reviewing
| Tesla's Autopilot and FSD where the cars do something incredibly
| scary and dangerous, and the drivers just laugh it off, go "well,
| it's a beta!" and continue using it instead of turning off the
| feature that almost got them into a car accident. I don't want to
| share the road with drivers who think dangerous driving is a
| funny game.
| gordon_freeman wrote:
| I think the main problem here seems to be that the driver has
| put too much trust into Autopilot and what she needs to do is
| rather assuming it is as just another driver assistance feature
| and always be in control of her vehicle at all times.
| rvz wrote:
| > I talked with the NTSB who said that they won't investigate
| because no one was killed.
|
| So they must wait until lots of people get killed by autopilot
| / FSD in order for your incident (and many others) to be
| investigated?
|
| The scary thing is that it is beta quality software on safety
| critical systems and not only the drivers know it, they use it
| as an excuse to cover them not paying attention on the road.
| Was driver monitoring even switched on at the time?
|
| As I have said before, this software without proper driver
| monitoring and autopilot / FSD turned on puts the driver and
| many others on the road at risk.
|
| At this point, this is more like Teslas on LSD rather than FSD
| judging from the bugs from many YouTube videos and social media
| posts of all of this.
|
| Oh dear.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > o they must wait until lots of people get killed by
| autopilot / FSD in order for your incident (and many others)
| to be investigated?
|
| The entire NTSB (which covers trains, planes and automobiles)
| has 400 employees. They only get pulled into fatal accidents
| because they only have that much manpower.
| raylad wrote:
| That low level of funding for such a critical function
| seems a clear threat to public safety.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The NHTSA has primary responsibility for highway safety
| at around $1B/yr in spend and 650-ish people.
| hasdf wrote:
| > "So she continued to use it? That's insane."
|
| Well its proving to be a great excuse when she runs into people
| with her car. Sounds like a win for her
| postmeta wrote:
| Was it TACC or Autopilot or FSD or driver trying to blame
| someone else?
| penjelly wrote:
| this is how i feel too. i want FSD to succeed and i dont want
| it to destroy itself during the beta. But the videos ive seen
| are how you put it, people say "whoa that was close" and then
| re-engage autopilot and have 3-4 more incidents in the same
| session
| FireBeyond wrote:
| And then laugh nervously, and demonstrate a complete
| misunderstanding of ML. "We need to keep having near misses
| to train the car of what a near miss might be!".
|
| And God forbid if they post a dashcam video to YouTube. Then
| they'll get hit with comments like this with a sincere
| straight face:
|
| > "FSD didn't try to kill you. More like you're trying to get
| FSD killed by publishing this video."
| ashtonkem wrote:
| "It's a beta" and the unsaid "and I don't care about other
| peoples' lives anyways".
|
| Still pretty frustrated nobody has regulated "self driving"
| cars off the market yet. If you're testing it with a driver and
| a copilot that's fine, but putting it in the hands of customers
| and using "it's a beta" to hide behind should not be legal.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _"It's a beta" and the unsaid "and I don't care about other
| peoples' lives anyways"._
|
| Yes, it's a bit distressing having myself and the people I
| care about be treated as NPCs to some Tesla owners as they
| beta test their new toys on public roadways.
| [deleted]
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I don't disagree, but I can't help but wonder if people
| feel the same about Ford's pre-collision assist with
| automatic emergency braking or, back in the day, anti-lock
| brakes.
|
| Sooner or later, these technologies are either public-ready
| or they aren't. If Tesla autopilot isn't public-ready, I
| agree it shouldn't be on the road, but I suddenly realize I
| have no idea by what criteria the system _was_ cleared for
| public-access roads.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I would absolutely not expect a feature attached to my
| car to be beta grade, no. And if early ABS systems had
| issues, I'd expect them to be recalled and fixed at the
| manufacturers cost.
| syshum wrote:
| I have long said that society has become such risk
| adverse that if someone invented a technology like the
| car today it would never be allowed in society.
|
| I said this pre-COVID, and COVID has now cemented this
| idea, we will not accept any level of risk at all...
| None.
|
| If it is not perfectly safe everything should be banned,
| locked down, or otherwise prohibited by law
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Well she says she did. Further confusing the matter is there is
| the FSD Beta, which very few people have access to for now.
| Then there is adaptive cruise (works really well!), then there
| is adaptive cruise with autosteer (not so good!). So who even
| knows which she was talking about.
|
| I fault Tesla for having a mess of badly named options, and for
| putting beta stuff out on the roads for sure.
| shmoe wrote:
| Yea, the fsd beta issues last weekend (weekend before?)
| involved false forward collision warnings.. I imagine she did
| not have the fsd beta though.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Then don't drive with other drivers - NON-autopilot drivers
| eating, texting (constantly!), seeming to look up directions
| and much more (falling asleep).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs0iwz3NEC0&t=2s
|
| The fact that you promote this absolute recklessness and demand
| users turn off safety features that may, net net save lives is
| depressing.
|
| Finally, folks get very confused between things like autopilot
| and other features (autosteer beta with FSD visualization) etc.
| I think some teslas now even show a message warning that cruise
| control will not brake in some cases? Anyone have that.
|
| I've been following the unintended acceleration claims around
| tesla's as well. Most seem pretty bogus.
|
| For what its worth here is data we currently have from Tesla:
|
| "In the 2nd quarter, we recorded one crash for every 4.41
| million miles driven in which drivers were using Autopilot
| technology (Autosteer and active safety features). For drivers
| who were not using Autopilot technology (no Autosteer and
| active safety features), we recorded one crash for every 1.2
| million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA's most recent data
| shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash
| every 484,000 miles."
|
| So you want to go to a 10x increase in crashes. (1 per 484 vs 1
| per 4M). I realize this is nt one to one, but even outside of
| this we are seeing maybe a 2x improvement (if your normalize
| for road conditions etc).
|
| Nission Maxima had something like 68 deaths per million
| registered vehicle years. Will be interesting to see how this
| comes out for Teslas.
| keefe8 wrote:
| > I think some teslas now even show a message warning that
| cruise control will not brake in some cases?
|
| In my experience, that warning about not braking occurs when
| you are in TACC mode but are pressing on the accelerator to
| go temporarily faster than the set speed.
| keefe8 wrote:
| Unfortunately some people may have gotten into the habit of
| hovering their foot over the accelerator to be ready to
| override phantom braking, so maybe some even rest their
| foot on the pedal without realizing.
|
| Fortunately, removal of radar will reduce the frequency of
| phantom braking, so hopefully this habit will fade.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > NON-autopilot drivers eating, texting (constantly!),
| seeming to look up directions and much more (falling asleep).
|
| FSD is something people are _encouraged_ to use, not
| _discourage_.
|
| This is an entirely disingenuous take.
|
| And Tesla's stats have been, _repeatedly_, shown to be
| entirely disingenuous.
|
| Human drivers don't have a "disengage" mode, other than
| pulling off the road, when conditions are "suboptimal". AP
| disengages. FSD disengages. And suboptimal conditions are,
| surprise, surprise, the conditions in which more incidents
| occur. So the whole "AP is safer because when it's safe to
| use AP it's safer" circuituous reasoning, and every stat
| Tesla publishes, while withholding as much information from
| the public as it can (while touting their "corporate
| transparency is a core value" spiel), should safely be thrown
| in the trash.
| [deleted]
| gameswithgo wrote:
| That data is not comparable, the autopilot in question there
| can only be activated in simple situations like a straight
| highway when you aren't changing lanes. While the human data
| is for all scenarios.
|
| Tesla is not being transparent enough with their data for us
| to know anything.
| slownews45 wrote:
| No one has shown any credible data that the fatality rate
| driving a tesla is higher than anything. They go out of
| their way to ignore cars getting into pretty clearly lots
| of accidents.
|
| My expectation would be that Suburu WRX / Infinit Q50 /
| Elantra GT type drivers are crashing more than folks using
| autopilot? Maybe ban them first?
|
| Anyways, we should in a few years get some NHTSA data on
| this, though there is some speculation that given their
| approach towards tesla if its possible they will delay it
| and stop updating vehicle model statistics if its favorable
| towards Tesla.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| The burden of evidence is on Tesla to show their car is
| significantly safer in an apples-to-apples comparison.
| They haven't done that so far.
|
| And this is actually quite intriguing: even if Tesla was
| 10x safer, it would be extremely difficult for them to
| prove it. Because they'd have to do a multi-year feature
| freeze on Autopilot etc. while collecting data.
|
| See in total, Tesla has sold around 2 million cars.
| Comparable cars have a fatal accident rate of around 10
| per 1 million vehicle years. So the target for Tesla with
| the current number of cars is to have less than 2
| fatalities per year, on average. To show with statistical
| significance that you have achieved that, you would need
| data for around 5 years without doing any changes. Maybe
| only 3 or 4 years given that the number of Tesla's keeps
| increasing, but still.
|
| Really, it's only when you're doing 10 million cars per
| year, like Volkswagen or Toyota, that you can make
| statistically meaningful statements about safety while
| also updating your car's software frequently.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| That's one subset.
|
| What people can credibly claim, because Tesla's stats are
| entirely loaded and biased, is that any claim AP is safer
| than humans is just that, a claim. Because AP will
| (usually) disengage in situations where it won't do well,
| something humans can't.
|
| The closest you could come (maybe, who knows, because
| Tesla hordes the raw data like Gollum, despite their
| "commitment to corporate transparency") is:
|
| "In optimal and safe driving conditions, AP may be safer
| than human drivers, and in less optimal conditions, uh,
| we don't know, because it turns off. And we won't count
| those miles against AP."
|
| Tesla should actually, if they have the courage of their
| convictions, show how many miles are driven where AP/FSD
| would refuse to engage.
| Diederich wrote:
| > Tesla's stats are entirely loaded and biased
|
| Do you _know_ that, or do you _suspect_ that?
|
| > how many miles are driven where AP/FSD would refuse to
| engage
|
| I've used FSD for the vast majority of the nearly 40k
| miles on my 2017 Tesla model S. Highways, boulevards,
| side streets, even dirt roads on occasion.
|
| It's a powerful but subtle tool. Used correctly, I have
| absolutely no doubt that has made my driving experience
| safer and less stressful.
|
| It definitely requires an engaged, alert driver.
|
| Where I suspect you and I agree is the impact of Musk's
| language and claims around the technology.
|
| If he would fully shut the hell up about it, I think it's
| quite likely that there would be way less ill will toward
| the product.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| It's known. The logical fallacy is accurate re "miles
| driven" versus "total possible miles". Tesla's
| statisticians cannot possibly be unaware of this if they
| have anything beyond a middle school education, yet they
| repeatedly continue to tout this stat without so much as
| a footnote.
|
| I realize that may still, to some, be "suspect", not
| "known", so yes, if you're asking, "Is there public or
| leaked internal documentation saying 'we realize these
| stats are misleading and don't care'", then no, there's
| not.
| czzr wrote:
| Here's some credible data that your assumptions are
| probably wrong:
|
| https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/teslas-driver-
| fatality-r...
| ricardobeat wrote:
| That page is not credible at all.
|
| IIHS reports are publicly available [1] and the numbers
| there don't match what's in the article at all.
| Large/very large luxury vehicles have an overall fatality
| rate of 16-21, ranging from 0 to 60 depending on model.
| The overall average for all vehicles is 36. The Audi A6
| for example, is reported as having 0 fatalities in the
| article, while in the report the actual number is 16.
|
| The other source used, tesladeaths.com, lists a ton of
| accidents where AP was not deemed responsible. It
| actually states the real number if you pay attention - 10
| confirmed deaths in the lifetime of Tesla as of 2021 -
| yet somehow the article claims 11 deaths up to 2016.
|
| [1] https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocument/status-
| report/pdf...
| gameswithgo wrote:
| The comparison there is as bad as elons in the other
| direction. They are digging into every missing bit of
| data and mistake for tesla in a different data set than
| other brands. I wonder of you could redo now with
| official data.
| dkdk8283 wrote:
| Still need transportation...
| gpvos wrote:
| She's supposed to be able to drive herself, without
| autopilot.
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| "The driver said she was using Autopilot"
|
| "she had actually had the same kind of collision on Autopilot
| previously!"
|
| I've got a hypothesis...and it has nothing to do with autopilot
| being faulty.
| taxcoder wrote:
| Likely an error in the seat to steering wheel connector - used
| to see it all the time when I worked on cars.
| iamleppert wrote:
| Tesla does the bare minimum when it comes to software QA on their
| autopilot. Looking at the codebase can tell you a few things:
|
| - There are few, if any unit tests. - No regression tests, no
| integration tests. - CI is "something to aspire to have one day"
| - Uses thousands of open source dependencies, many of which are
| updated randomly based on if a developer needs or wants to. - No
| code review process. - Lots of commented out code, dead code. -
| No code linters or pre-commit process. - About 5 different
| architectures due to in part constant churn on the team.
|
| Anyone who allows the "Tesla autopilot" would think twice if they
| actually knew the quality of code that they are betting their
| lives on. It's a dumpster fire.
| trhway wrote:
| an idea for startup - a flat screen mounted on the back of your
| car and a rear looking AI. Once it recognizes say Tesla behind
| you, it will display on the screen an image which is known to be
| successfully recognized by Tesla, so it wouldn't rear-end you. Of
| course it isn't limited to Tesla. Also there is very good
| business case for subscription as Tesla and the others update
| their autonomous AI, the users would need updates to that anti-
| rear-ending software.
| MaxBareiss wrote:
| Correct me if this is what you meant by "talked with the NHTSA",
| but another place you can submit information is to the NHTSA
| Office of Defects Investigation (ODI):
| https://www.nhtsa.gov/report-a-safety-problem#index , which is
| the group that forces automakers to do recalls.
|
| In my opinion (PhD student in vehicle safety) it doesn't sound
| severe or novel enough for the NTSB to investigate. NTSB has done
| good reports on a couple of similar Tesla Autopilot crashes
| (https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/?NTSBNumber=HWY18FH011
| https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/?NTSBNumber=HWY16FH018).
|
| _minor note: NHTSA is spoken as "nit-sah" so "NHTSA" is better
| than "the NHTSA". NTSB is spoken as "N-T-S-B" and is fine._
| modeless wrote:
| Detecting stationary objects is a known issue with _every_ driver
| assist system. No automaker 's system guarantees that it will
| stop for stationary objects. In fact they all explicitly state
| that they may not. It's a known and disclosed and accepted risk
| of these systems.
|
| Ford: "may not detect stationary or slow moving vehicles"
| https://www.fordservicecontent.com/Ford_Content/Catalog/owne...
|
| Tesla: "may not recognize or detect oncoming vehicles, stationary
| objects, and special-use lanes such as those used exclusively for
| bikes, carpools, emergency vehicles, etc"
| https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-0535381...
|
| GM: "may not detect and react to stopped or slow-moving vehicles
| ahead of you"
| https://my.chevrolet.com/content/dam/gmownercenter/gmna/dyna...
|
| etc. You can find it in every brand's manual. NTSB and NHTSA knew
| that this risk existed when they approved these systems. There is
| nothing to investigate.
| raylad wrote:
| Yes, but there is usually an additional system like Toyota's
| Safety Stop which WILL detect a stationary object and kick in
| at the last minute to reduce speed by N MPH before collision.
|
| AFAIK Tesla used to have that via its RADAR but because the new
| production has no RADAR, new cars can't have it, and they
| disabled it on the older cars too, in the interest of using a
| single software version.
|
| At least this is what I've gathered from reading here and
| elsewhere.
| modeless wrote:
| Radar is useless for detecting stationary objects because of
| far too many false positives. Radar is the reason why these
| warnings exist. It is not the solution.
|
| Teslas continue to have forward collision warning and
| automatic emergency braking as standard features whether or
| not they have radar. But again, they do not detect 100% of
| all stationary objects and neither does any other automaker's
| system.
| raylad wrote:
| These systems do work and have worked for years. They are
| also regularly tested by IIHS.
|
| See, for example:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJgUiZgX5rE
|
| And Teslas at least used to do this too:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJJfn2tO5fo
|
| If they no longer stop reliably to avoid hitting stationary
| objects, this is a serious problem that needs to be
| corrected.
| modeless wrote:
| They absolutely _work_ but they are not _reliable_. Not
| on _any_ car. They are a safety system of last resort.
| conductr wrote:
| > It's a known and disclosed and accepted risk of these
| systems.
|
| Accepted by who? As another driver getting rear-ended by these
| vehicles, I didn't agree to that. It's just a way for them to
| shift liability to the driver for what they know is going to
| happen.
|
| This technology shouldn't be allowed on the road unless it
| could detect and avoid impact with parked cars. This should be
| price of admission for the technology.
| modeless wrote:
| Accepted by NTSB and NHTSA.
| mwint wrote:
| Have your insurance company harass Tesla. Chances are they'll
| come back with a report saying "driver depressing accelerator
| 13.42deg at time of incident overriding AEB and ignoring FCW for
| 5 seconds". That's usually how these kinds of stories end.
| xtracto wrote:
| That was my thought as well, over here, if a car rear-ends you,
| both conductors stop, call their respective insurance
| companies, wait until a representative arrives and let them
| deal with the consequences.
|
| As an individual we don't have bargaining power vs stupid
| automotive choices. But insurance companies have in their best
| interests to make sure somebody else will pay.
| fmakunbound wrote:
| I wonder if we'll see a difference liability insurance rates
| for Tesla owners vs. the others. If they're truly road-bound,
| OTA-distracted, undirected electric missiles, I'm sure we'll
| see a difference there before we hear back from NTSB.
| pdonis wrote:
| The OP's insurance company should be asking the other driver's
| insurance company to cover the loss. Then the other driver's
| insurance company should be harassing Tesla if it believes
| Tesla was responsible.
| soheil wrote:
| It's probably safe to assume that if she were going to do
| that she would have done that the first she got into this
| type of high speed accident.
| mwint wrote:
| OP's insurance company can harass Tesla directly if they
| believe Tesla holds evidence of the true cause of the crash,
| which they probably do.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| But neither is going to go after Tesla, because insurance
| companies aren't about ferocious prosecution of potentially
| valid legal claims, or manifesting customer outrage, but
| getting things resolved in a final manner as quickly as
| possible with as little out of their pocket as possible.
|
| To go after Tesla for defective FSD over any individual
| accident takes a litigant who is more concerned with making
| a point and/or harming Tesla than cost effectiveness.
| raylad wrote:
| I doubt they will do anything.
|
| They have a process: claims adjuster looks at the police
| report, looks at the wreckage, proposes a payment, closes the
| file. Anything else would be extra work on their part and not
| required or probably even encouraged.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Oh, you assume Tesla won't fight to the death to avoid
| releasing data recorder information. They will.
|
| Unless it "absolves" Tesla.
|
| Remember, this is the company that when someone died, put out
| actual PRESS RELEASES to say "Not the car's fault. In fact it
| warned him before the collision that he was inattentive."
|
| They neglected to mention it triggered ONE steering wheel
| warning... FOURTEEN MINUTES before the collision.
|
| Even your example is problematic. "FSD/AP isn't at fault/didn't
| cause the collision/near miss, because it wasn't engaged..."
|
| ... because the driver had to take emergency action to avert
| FSD/AP's behavior.
|
| They got taken to task for that, when investigatory boards
| started asking "just how long before that collision was FSD/AP
| disengaged, and was it disengaged by hard manual braking,
| etc.?"
| filoleg wrote:
| > Oh, you assume Tesla won't fight to the death to avoid
| releasing data recorder information. They will.
|
| Last time this happened in a similar situation, the driver
| went to a third-party technician that was able to extract the
| log data, and it proved the same thing that Tesla was
| claiming. The driver was full-on pressing accelerator instead
| of the braking pedal.[0]
|
| Raw log data is present in that link, so it isn't just
| another "he said one thing, they said another thing"
| situation. But the driver in question was indeed fighting to
| death claiming their innocence, even thought the initial
| accident was already raising eyebrows of most people familiar
| with autopilot.
|
| 0. https://insideevs.com/news/496305/valet-crashes-tesla-
| data-r...
| paxys wrote:
| Insurance companies aren't going to bother investigating
| autopilot until this issue gets a lot more widespread. Rear-end
| accidents happen thousands of times a day.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think the comments section here neatly summarizes how liability
| for any self-driving bugs will be foisted onto individual
| drivers.
|
| This was once a big question mark for me - who would be liable in
| a self-driving crash, the driver or the manufacturer? Apparently
| individuals _want_ to be liable. It 's not clear whether this is
| the result of marketing or ideology.
| krisoft wrote:
| It is not a self-driving car unless you can have a sleep in it
| while it takes you where you need to go in my opinion. :)
|
| Take a real self-driving car for example: a waymo taxi you are
| riding in rear-ends an other car. Do you think you will be
| responsible for it?
| lvs wrote:
| Consumer protection is weak in the US. In numerous cases of
| faulty products and negligent manufacturers, failures of
| regulatory agencies to intervene eventually escalates into
| class actions of victims, owners, or state AGs against
| manufacturers -- with variable outcomes. We've seen it with
| opioids, cigarettes, guns, diet pills, etc..
| sidibe wrote:
| I have a feeling a lot of stuff is being swept under the rug at
| this stage. Watching how many near misses are on YouTube from a
| handful of beta testers, the only accidents I've seen are rims
| being destroyed by curbing. From the amount of dicy things it's
| doing I find it hard to believe there's no accidents. Especially
| before the rollback last week of 10.3 where a lot of people
| reported very dangerous behavior as soon as it rolled out
| mtoner23 wrote:
| Wait till you see the amount of car accidents from non
| autopilot vehicles! you'd want to ban cars all together if a
| youtube video was posted for every accident.
| sidibe wrote:
| Humans are pretty good drivers compared to FSD beta. If you
| think that's not true after trying it or watching some videos
| I would appreciate it if you tore up your license and used
| Uber
| mbushey wrote:
| > Humans are pretty good drivers compared to FSD beta. Lol!
| You haven't driven in Montana, have you? What I see in the
| latest youtube videos is an order of magnitude better than
| the average driver here.
| soheil wrote:
| So sad that the average non-Tesla driver is not as
| enthusiastic about latest technology as not to broadcast
| their driving journeys on YouTube for the rest of the world
| to criticize and make fun of the shady dumpster fire of a
| manufacturer that made their car when they get into a close
| call.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Come on, that's blatant whataboutism. Surely we're good
| enough here to realize that we can hold both Tesla _and_
| other drivers to a higher standard?
|
| Yes, people are often bad drivers. But it doesn't follow that
| we must ignore the faults of any self driving technology just
| because regular drivers crash too. If Tesla is pushing out
| updates that make their own super fans comment on the cars
| doing unsafe and erratic things, that's something we should
| look into.
| jjk166 wrote:
| No, we can't. Accidents are going to happen no matter what
| because driving is a complex task with an infinite number
| of potential failure modes, and no threshold where the risk
| of serious injury or death can be considered zero. If
| something is safer than average, then it is objectively an
| improvement, and that's all it needs to be.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > If something is safer than average, then it is
| objectively an improvement, and that's all it needs to
| be.
|
| GP is asserting that FSD is significantly less safe than
| previously known, and only driver intervention is
| preventing FSD from killing more people. Personally I've
| heard way too many "FSD regularly tries to drive into
| that bridge pillar" for me to believe an assertion that
| FSD is safer than drivers without significant evidence.
|
| Second, we're talking about a case where even Tesla
| owners acknowledge that an update made their cars
| noticeably less safe. Even in cases where FSD is better
| than human drivers, which I don't think is the case yet,
| we should be quite concerned about the possibility of
| software updates making vehicles less safe.
| jjk166 wrote:
| My comment was made in response to GP's claim that it is
| whataboutism to compare the safety record of FSD to human
| drivers. It is entirely possible that FSD actually is
| less safe than drivers, and if so let the evidence show
| it. But the fact remains that you should very much be
| comparing the safety of FSD to human driving.
| NickM wrote:
| I don't think that's an example of whataboutism, given that
| one of the stated goals of autopilot is literally to
| provide a safer alternative to the status quo of humans
| driving manually; pointing out the riskiness of driving in
| general is not some unrelated thing that's being raised as
| a distraction from the real issue.
| [deleted]
| soheil wrote:
| I'm not sure what you think Autopilot is. It's basically adaptive
| cruise control which almost all new cars have. As shocking as
| this may sound like the onus is on the driver to avoid a high
| speed collision when approaching a stopped car at a red light.
| The driver should push the brake petal.
|
| Just because it was a Tesla somehow this is a problem that NTSB
| and NHTSA need to investigate? But if it was a Honda Civic it's
| just an accident?
| huslage wrote:
| She is still the driver. Blaming things on Autopilot is not going
| to get anyone very far in the legal sense.
| JshWright wrote:
| Tesla seems to want it both ways... Sell their cars by
| marketing how magical the autopilot is, then blaming drivers
| when the believe the marketing hype.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Yup. Tesla will happily put out press releases saying
| "autopilot is not at fault - the vehicle warned the driver
| prior to the collision to put hands on the steering wheel"...
|
| One warning. Fourteen minutes prior to the incident. That
| part wasn't in the press release.
|
| The Summon feature is the same.
|
| Marketing copy: "Use Summon in a car park to bring your
| vehicle to you while dealing with a fussy child" (literal
| quote).
|
| Disclaimer: "Do not use Summon while distracted."
|
| There's apparently a giant Chinese wall between Marketing and
| Legal at Tesla, because it's far from the only example.
| Another, that's still present in some Tesla videos, and has
| been there for years:
|
| > The driver is only in the seat for legal reasons. The car
| is driving itself.
| buffington wrote:
| I only have my own experience to draw upon, so I may be an
| outlier, but I didn't buy a Tesla because of its Autopilot
| feature. If they pulled the feature today, I'd be totally
| fine with that.
|
| As a user of Autopilot, it's absolutely insane to me that
| anyone would blame Autopilot for a wreck. It's like a "smart"
| cruise control, except unlike cruise control, it gives you
| all sorts of warnings about your role as the driver and will
| shut itself off if it thinks you're not paying attention. Any
| one blaming Autopilot for a Tesla wreck is either trying to
| sensationalize, or is just completely inept or lying.
| yupper32 wrote:
| > I didn't buy a Tesla because of its Autopilot feature. If
| they pulled the feature today, I'd be totally fine with
| that.
|
| Many many people paid $1000+ for the promise of Full Self-
| Driving that doesn't exist. People definitely care about
| the Autopilot feature a lot more than you.
|
| > It's like a "smart" cruise control
|
| Except they call it Autopilot! You can't call something
| Autopilot and then blame people for expecting the car to
| drive itself.
|
| Call it lane assist or cruise control plus or something.
| [deleted]
| lnanek2 wrote:
| Maybe it is being investigated and you don't know. For both
| drivers, your responsibility begins and ends with getting a
| police report done and informing the insurance companies, then
| they'll fight it out. If they think they can go after Tesla,
| instead of one of them paying, they will. You aren't going to
| hear about it regardless.
| veltas wrote:
| Recently I was driving behind a Tesla and it suddenly started
| braking for no reason at all, I almost rear-ended it. I think it
| had something to do with the sun reflecting on the road surface
| brightly because I noticed this reflection just as I was driving
| past where the car suddenly started braking.
| kf6nux wrote:
| You might be able to seek a criminal complaint (not that I
| recommend it). You can call your local DA's office to see what
| they think. It's unlikely they'd want to take on Tesla, but a CA
| DA might go after the driver for criminal negligence.
| tacobelllover99 wrote:
| Take on Tesla? The driver is responsible at all times. If AP
| was failing to stop the driver should have been paying
| attention and took over.
| dalys wrote:
| My VW Passat was on ACC and LKAS just a week ago when it suddenly
| stopped detecting the car in front and was about to drive into
| it. This was also at a red light. As I was actually paying
| attention, I just hit the brakes manually. Technology isnt
| perfect. This happens to all cars.
| a-dub wrote:
| i recently rented a late model rav4 and played around with the
| lane keeping and radar cruise control.
|
| it kinda drove like a drunk lead footed teenager. it was cool
| conceptually, but it didn't seem to work very well and it was a
| rough ride of heavy acceleration and deceleration with
| occasional odd steering choices. it also had these lights on
| the mirrors that would light up when someone was in the blind
| spots, which ultimately were kind of annoying/distracting.
|
| it felt like maybe the ui for these features, which seemed to
| push you towards setting adaptive cruise and lane keeping, and
| then letting the car do the rest, wasn't really in line with
| the actual capabilities of the system. although, maybe i just
| wasn't used to it. it would certainly do scary things like
| accelerate harshly upon cars ahead when the road was curved or
| had small hills that temporarily obscured direct line of sight
| to them.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| If you're in California, you could file an OL-316 since a citizen
| could reasonably expect to think that this is an example of a
| "traffic collision involving an autonomous vehicle", and Tesla is
| a licensed member of that program. At worst, they'll refuse the
| report for some reason or another.
| op00to wrote:
| You should delete this post, stop talking to people, and get a
| really good lawyer because you are gonna get a little bit of
| Elon's billions!
| szundi wrote:
| Just imagine that you're a person who constantly lies about
| anything just to feel better. You have a Tesla. You made a
| mistake and hit this car. You get out, what do you say.
|
| That's what I thought.
|
| Obviously this is just one possible scenario, one of the others
| is OP's interpretation that the lady was telling the truth.
| raylad wrote:
| My interpretation is that it may or may not be what happened,
| and should be investigated.
| tacobelllover99 wrote:
| Yeah it seems like a serious problem that the driver wasn't
| paying attention for sure.
|
| My money is OP is a short
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| If this keeps happening, it seems like a logical consequence
| would be for Teslas to become more expensive to insure.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| Nah, if indeed AP on was more dangerous than AP off then Tesla
| would just shut it down over the wire.
| klyrs wrote:
| I'd agree if you say "less profitable" instead of "more
| dangerous."
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Sue Tesla. It's their responsibility for this garbage. You will
| get all the incriminating data during discovery.
| slownews45 wrote:
| That's not how it works. You sue the driver, if they have
| insurance the insurance company steps in, after paying you out
| the insurance company can go after tesla.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > That's not how it works. You sue the driver, if they have
| insurance the insurance company steps in, after paying you
| out the insurance company can go after tesla.
|
| That's...not how it works.
|
| Anyone injured as a result of a defective product has a claim
| against the manufacturer and anyone else in the chain of
| commerce. You don't have to sue someone else and let them sue
| the manufacturer.
|
| (You _can_ , but you don't have to, and its a complicated
| tactical consideration as to whether it is optimal in any
| particular case, further complicated by the fact that you can
| also sue _everyone who might be liable at once_ , instead of
| picking and choosing who is best to sue.)
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| If that's not how it works we'd still have Pintos and
| Corvairs on the streets. Companies can be held responsible
| for defective products no matter how much they want the shift
| the blame to someone else.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| That's best if your goal is to get your car fixed and
| (hopefully none) medical bills paid. That's not likely to
| result in Tesla paying anything and certainly not in Tesla
| changing behavior.
|
| If you want to go for the giant settlement from Tesla, that's
| a different lawsuit, much higher-risk, much more expensive
| and much higher reward (financially, media attention and
| changing behavior).
| trutannus wrote:
| Sue a billion dollar company? I'm not sure that's a solution
| for the vast majority of people. Fighting discovery is
| generally step one in the process of dealing with this sort of
| lawsuit. Something like this could/will take years, and
| hundreds of thousands of dollars to deal with.
|
| It would be likely cheaper to buy a whole new car every year
| for five years than to take Tesla to court.
| bolasanibk wrote:
| Nit: 1 $[T]rillion as of today.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Or you may find out the driver of the Tesla was lying.
| [deleted]
| soheil wrote:
| > The driver said she was using Autopilot, that an OTA update had
| had a problem earlier in the day, and that she had actually had
| the same kind of collision on Autopilot previously!
|
| She had the same type of high speed collision in the past and
| continues to keep relying on Autopilot so heavily to cause yet
| another collision? I mean is the average high collision rate for
| Tesla drivers close to 2? Or is it just this driver?
| INTPenis wrote:
| It's not actually that much different than a negligent driver.
| The driver was negligent with the OTA update and the driver was
| negligent enough to trust autopilot in traffic.
|
| Tesla should of course improve its autopilot technology but I
| don't see how they're responsible for the crash.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| A common reason people (me included) fault Tesla is that their
| marketing is designed to instill more trust in the auto pilot
| feature than the user ought have given that feature's maturity,
| while cleverly dancing around the truth to avoid legal
| liability, which can instead be placed on "negligent drivers."
| INTPenis wrote:
| My perspective is skewed because I'm in Sweden but in real
| world situations I've seen more good about adaptive cruise
| control than Tesla autopilot. Tesla autopilot is mostly
| something I see hyped on HN or reddit.
|
| But in real life, adaptive cruise control is being used all
| the time, and no good driver that I know trusts it with their
| life or their insurance.
| buffington wrote:
| I own a Tesla, and I'm not a Tesla apologist. There's tons of
| stuff that is just wrong about that car (the UI for example,
| is a dumpster fire).
|
| That said, I recall hearing some stuff in the early Tesla
| days about how the cars could drive themselves. Summoning,
| auto parking, and some hints at what we now know as Full Self
| Driving.
|
| Aside from that, I don't recall much marketing hype around
| Autopilot. It has a bullet point on the Model 3 website, and
| some details on the naming of related features and what they
| do, but that's about it. None of it seems like "hype".
|
| Here's the full description of Autopilot:
|
| > Autopilot enables your car to steer, accelerate and brake
| automatically within its lane.
|
| That's it.
|
| In the car's user manual it makes it very clear what the
| feature does and what your responsibilities are as a driver.
| They don't make it out as some sort of magical feature.
| shmoe wrote:
| Someone needs to tell this to the idiot at my mother's
| office that praises autopilot because he can answer all his
| emails during his commutes.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Things like Elon Musk (he is the Tesla CEO) making
| statements about the self-driving capabilities of the
| vehicle come to mind: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/elon-
| musk-says-every-new-tesla...
|
| You're correct about what's in the fine print. But this
| Musk fellow is effectively Tesla's salesman in chief, and
| has quite a following on the Internet.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| For reference, Tesla's marketing[1] is clear about what
| they mean when they say "Autopilot" and "Full Self-
| Driving":
|
| > _The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal
| reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving
| itself._
|
| [1] https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-
| hardware...
| [deleted]
| revscat wrote:
| Why do you think she was telling the truth? People's instincts in
| such situations are for self-preservation, and shifting blame
| elsewhere is common.
| buffington wrote:
| I drive a Tesla. If my car rear ends another car, that's my
| fault. Doesn't matter if I had Autopilot on or not.
|
| Imagine if you were rear ended by a Toyota and the driver said
| "it was on cruise control, _shrug_. " Would you talk to NTSB or
| NHTSA about that? Probably not.
|
| The only scenario I can imagine that'd warrant investigation is
| if the driver were completely unable to override Autopilot.
| Similar investigations have been started by NTSB when Toyota had
| issues with their cruise control systems several years ago.
| cinntaile wrote:
| The big black box makes a mistake and you voluntarily accept
| the blame? I really don't get this train of thought. I know
| that this is legally correct, but at some point in time along
| the technological advancement of self driving technology we'll
| have to stop blaming ourselves and legally shift the blame to
| whoever created the self driving tech instead.
|
| Edit: Updated wording to make it less confusing. From system to
| whoever created the self driving tech.
| hasdf wrote:
| when you turn on autopilot it tells you to keep your hands on
| the wheel and if it senses you are distracted it will turn it
| off if you don't wiggle the wheel a little to show you are
| paying attention. So at least as far as autopilot is
| concerned I would say the driver is at fault if they run into
| another car.
| RichardHesketh wrote:
| Yes, and that point is most likely SAE level 5, as shown here
| (https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/automated-
| vehicl...). We are some way away from that - just how far
| depends on whose hype you listen to.
|
| I drive a Tesla Model 3, but I have sufficient grey matter to
| understand that AutoPilot, in spite of its name, is SAE level
| 2 (see above reference). If the car is involved in an impact
| either something hit me, or I hit something - no blame
| attaches to the computer, because I'm still in charge. Given
| the current state of the art, I'm perfectly happy with that
| and bloody livid at anybody who is dumb enough to buy/lease
| and drive one of these amazing machines without being
| constantly and totally aware of their limitations.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > Yes, and that point is most likely SAE level 5
|
| Hard disagree.
|
| This is the same as identity theft, where it becomes your
| responsibility instead of a failure on the part of the bank
| to protect your account, and the burden gets shifted
| entirely onto the consumer.
|
| Relevant Michell and Webb:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E
|
| If Tesla sells a SAE Level 2 lane following / accident
| avoidance feature which should be able to stop and avoid
| rear end collisions, yet it causes rear end collisions,
| they must be liable for that failure. They can't just write
| words and shift all liability onto the consumer for the
| software failing to work properly. Nice try though.
|
| And I don't care if the consumer technically agreed to
| that. If someone smacks into me with Autopilot enabled, I
| never consented to that technology and didn't give up my
| rights to sue Tesla.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| I saw an old dude apparently asleep behind the wheel of a
| tesla while on the freeway. I immediately feared for my
| family members's lives, and I had to speed in order to gain
| distance from this fellow.
| movedx wrote:
| Because as the driver you're responsible for the tool you're
| using to drive your self to your destination. That means
| you're responsible for whether or not you use Autopilot, do
| 200kmph, take your hands off of the steering wheel, turn your
| lights on at night, and everything else associated with the
| operation of that vehicle.
|
| > ... at some point in time along the technological
| advancement of self driving technology we'll have to stop
| blaming ourselves.
|
| No we don't. We built it, so we're responsible for it and the
| consequences associated with its operation, regardless of how
| well it's engineered or how smart we think we are.
| cinntaile wrote:
| > We built it, so we're responsible for it and the
| consequences associated with its operation, regardless of
| how well it's engineered or how smart we think we are.
|
| That's my point. The company that built the self driving
| technology should be held responsible. If you're not
| driving you're not responsible, that's how it works when
| somebody else is driving your car as well so why would it
| be any different if that somebody else is code? It seems
| like a good way to align the incentives to create a safe
| system. You could claim that at this point in time you
| still have to pay attention and take control when
| necessary, the issue I have with that argument is that we
| already have research showing us that the context switch
| results in a delay that's too long to be really useful in
| practice.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Yeah and honestly the chain of responsibility is driver
| first then tesla. What's important is the victim gets their
| payout. It's the drivers responsibility to provide that
| payout / get dinged on insurance. if the driver then wants
| to complaint to tesla for damages that's totally fair. But
| the victim's compensation should come first from the
| driver. The driver can't say "but muh autopilot" and
| release all blame
| ipaddr wrote:
| The question is the driver responsible? Should it be the
| owner? Should it be the company who made the failing
| product?
|
| If your toaster blows up and kills someone a solid case
| against the maker of toasterb
| Someone wrote:
| Yes, and no. With other dangerous tools, society decided
| manufacturers have responsibilities, too.
|
| If you buy a chainsaw, you can trust it has certain safety
| features. If you buy a children's toy, you can trust it
| doesn't use lead paint, etc.
|
| Those aren't features you, as a consumer, have to
| explicitly test for before using them.
|
| Similarly, I think society will demand that cars behave as
| cars, and not as projectiles. If a manufacturer claims a
| car has auto-pilot, but that auto-pilot has a tendency to
| rear end other cars, the manufacturer should carry at least
| some blame.
|
| I think that should be true even if they explicitly mention
| that problem in the instruction manual. Certainly in the
| EU, whatever you buy, you can assume it is "fit for its
| purpose".
| syshum wrote:
| The problem here is Tesla does not make the claim that
| the car is autonomous, in fact they clearly state
| otherwise, nor it is legal for any driver to operate the
| car like it was autonomous
|
| To continue your analogy Chainsaw manufacturers include
| clear instructions, and directions to use safety PPE.. if
| a operator of the chainsaw fails to follow the
| instructions, or where the PPE and chops their leg off
| the manufacturer is not liable.. Hell even if they did
| follow the instructions and chop their leg off it would
| be unlikely the manufacturer would be liable.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Lets take the analogy one step further. Imagine we have
| an Autopilot chainsaw, you just have to touch it every
| once in a while to tell it to keep sawing. Then suddenly
| it starts sawing in a completely unexpected way and
| causes an accident. Are you at fault because you have to,
| in theory, keep in control at all times? Even though you
| in practice relinquish control and humans don't have the
| ability to context switch without a delay? The issue
| would not have occured if the chainsaw didn't start
| behaving in an unexpected way but it also would not have
| occured if you didn't use the Autopilot function.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I agree, but if you bought a tool called "autopilot" and it
| piloted you into another car, there is something wrong, no?
| Maybe not the NHTSA, but it seems like someone should be
| tallying that.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| Has Tesla ever said anything like: the "auto" in this
| case means "automobile" and not "automatic"?
|
| But yeah, they shouldn't call it that.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Incorrect. You are responsible for using the tool
| responsibly and according to any applicable directions and
| best practices.
| dafoex wrote:
| I didn't build it, Tesla did, and I personally think the
| company that signed off on "touch screen controlled window
| wipers" is the one with the most liability in autopilot
| failures.
| [deleted]
| dafoex wrote:
| Context: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53666222
| amelius wrote:
| > I drive a Tesla. If my car rear ends another car, that's my
| fault. Doesn't matter if I had Autopilot on or not.
|
| You can have a similar argument for: if I'm drunk while driving
| that's _my_ choice; if I don 't cause any accidents, it should
| be none of anybody's business that I'm drunk.
|
| You see, it doesn't work like that.
|
| If Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users, then
| an investigation is warranted.
| moate wrote:
| No, you're right, none of what you're talking about works
| like that.
|
| There was a traffic accident. There are a variety of
| "automated" driving features in modern cars: Auto-park,
| cruise control, auto-pilot. Any one of these features could,
| under "less than ideal" circumstances, cause an accident that
| doesn't warrant contacting national authorities. Well before
| any regulatory body is going to do anything, private
| insurance would. They're going to investigate in an effort to
| determine fault and facts. Was autopilot to blame, or did the
| user spill a cup of coffee in the passenger's seat that
| caused them to take their eyes off the road, etc.
|
| The idea that a national regulatory body is going to start
| looking into a single car crash seems great until you start
| thinking about the expense that would create for the
| taxpayers. Bureaucracy just isn't built to be agile, for
| better or worse.
|
| Similarly, if you drive drunk and don't cause an accident,
| nobody will know. This doesn't make it legal, and nobody is
| trying to argue a point even tangentially similar to that.
| This is a straw man, and a rather obvious one. There is no
| national group that would ever investigate a drunk driving
| crash (assuming that was the only relevant information in the
| case). That's a local law enforcement issue.
|
| TL;dr- The feds don't care about a sample size of 1 fender
| bender with no fatalities.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| The class of problem called driving while incapacitated was
| studied and special regulatory attention was applied to it.
|
| An automated driving system that can offer to function
| while incapacitated without the operater even being
| informed that there is any problem, is a different problem
| from an operator that neglected to press the brake pedal.
| The brake pedal itself and the rest of the braking system
| is absolutely required to meet a whole bunch of fitness
| standards.
| zamadatix wrote:
| An NTSB investigation is a separate thing from an accident
| investigation for fault or insurance purposes. The NTSB does
| not investigate a drunk driver, that does not mean the drunk
| driver would be free of fault or charges.
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| A more apt comparison would be if OP was hit by a drunk
| driver, and there were no laws against drunk driving. It
| would be appropriate to ask the government to investigate
| whether or not drunk driving is safe, because it could
| happen to many more people.
| situationista wrote:
| Except that both Tesla and the law make it clear that in
| a Level 2 system the driver is responsible at all times,
| regardless of whether Autopilot is engaged or not.
| riffraff wrote:
| To stretch the metaphor further, I don't think it's fair
| to say Tesla makes it clear. Or better, it's not all the
| story.
|
| People would be less upset with the drunk driver and more
| with the beer manufacture if they had been imbibing
| "alcohol free beer" which actually was not alcohol free.
| asdfsd234234444 wrote:
| lol, what
| wyldfire wrote:
| > Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users,
| then an investigation is warranted.
|
| You could fault their methods but NTSB is doing just that:
| waiting for a trend to emerge that would warrant such an
| investigation.
|
| I'm not suggesting that Tesla's design is not the cause but
| if the driver were lying in order to shift blame, then NTSB
| would end up wasting their resources investigating it.
| ajross wrote:
| > If Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users,
| then an investigation is warranted.
|
| Except there's no evidence that it does. I drive a Tesla.
| I've seen AP brake hard in circumstances where a distracted
| driver would have failed to notice. The system works. It does
| not work _perfectly_. But all it has to do to make that "if"
| clause false is work better than drivers do, and that's a
| very low bar.
|
| Tesla themselves publish data on this, and cars get in fewer
| accidents with AP engaged. (So then the unskewers jump in and
| argue about how that's not apples and oranges, and we all end
| up in circles of nuance and no one changes their opinion. But
| it doesn't matter what opinions are because facts are all
| that matter here, and what facts exist say AP is safer than
| driving.)
| pempem wrote:
| This is so tremendously _NOT_ a case of personal
| responsibility. A large portion of our economy attempts to rely
| on the belief of: "you said it would do x, it must do x".
|
| You bought a car, it promised functionality, it did not deliver
| and endangered another human/their property.
|
| This is the fault of the manufacturer.
|
| Here are some examples of non-autonomous driving cases where
| the manufacturer made a false promise: Volvo lawsuit:
| https://www.motorbiscuit.com/volvo-owners-seeking-class-acti...
|
| Toyota recall after lawsuit https://www.industryweek.com/the-
| economy/article/21959153/to...
|
| Chevy lawsuit: https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-
| settlements/consumer-pro...
|
| It is my sincere hope that we can enjoy Elon's persona without
| just letting Tesla off the hook of being a car company. Or
| really, a company.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Based on videos and observed driving behavior, it seems the
| marketing and documentation for Autopilot is ineffective at
| communicating to drivers that Autopilot is basically advanced
| cruise control. If this is correct, it represents a systemic
| issue that should be investigated by the NTSB or NHTSA.
| soheil wrote:
| The moment you use Autopilot it's evident that it's basically
| a fancy cruise control. You're assuming some people would not
| interfere with Autopilot in any scenario. To think somehow
| people with that much lack of common sense exist is odd. It
| shows a massive level of disregard for those people's ability
| to perform basic functions.
| cma wrote:
| https://tesla.com/autopilot
|
| In the video there it says:
|
| "THE PERSON IN THE SEAT IS ONLY THERE FOR LEGAL REASONS.
|
| HE IS NOT DOING ANYTHING. THE CAR IS DRIVING ITSELF."
|
| Total lie unless they are psycopaths and would be willing to
| run it with no one in the seat if not for legal reasons. In
| other words unless they were willing to murder if murder were
| legal--the video is from 2018 or maybe even earlier, where we
| know they were nowhere near ready for driverless.
| EastOfTruth wrote:
| > I drive a Tesla. If my car rear ends another car, that's my
| fault. Doesn't matter if I had Autopilot on or not.
|
| It is supposed to be super-self-driving... it has to count for
| something.
| jsight wrote:
| I think there is a good argument that now is a good time for a
| liability shift for certain types of accidents with TACC. TACC
| should never be rear ending people.
| sokoloff wrote:
| It's a driver aid, not a driver replacement. I'm responsible
| for where my airplane autopilot takes the airplane (in large
| part because I'll be the first one to arrive at the accident
| scene).
|
| Why shouldn't the driver be responsible for accidents in the
| car they're driving at the current level of driver assist
| technology?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| a bad actor can easily create an accident of this
| description, no?
| soheil wrote:
| It's so odd that in stories like this people don't even ask
| this simple question: did you try to brake?
|
| It's usually conveniently omitted from the story.
| kjhughes wrote:
| > _There were two impacts somehow. It was a 4-car pileup and my
| car was destroyed._
|
| Likely explanation for two impacts during a rear-end pileup:
|
| 1. Tesla rear-ends your car.
|
| 2. Another car rear-ends the Tesla, propelling it forward and
| hitting your car a second time.
| raylad wrote:
| Tesla was rear car. Nothing else hit it. It hit me twice.
| cbo100 wrote:
| Doesn't this indicate that she was likely "panic braking" on
| the accelerator?
|
| This would override AEB / TACC on any vehicle I own, radar or
| not.
| raylad wrote:
| Yes, I thought that could be the case too, but no way to
| know without seeing the logs.
| hasdf wrote:
| yeah this seems to be the most likely scenario. It sounds
| like the original poster's car was in the middle, tesla was
| at the end. OP's car suddenly breaks (or hits someone),
| tesla either does not react fast enough or starts reacting
| and then the tesla driver hits the gas pedal (meaning to
| break). Still not sure how they would be able to hit it
| twice if they hadn't backed up though.
| raylad wrote:
| I slowed down gradually and was already stopped at the
| red light with 2 cars in front of me when the Tesla
| plowed into my car.
| [deleted]
| oblib wrote:
| Sounds to me like the Tesla tried to keep going after it hit
| you. Those cars really should not be allowed to use that tech
| and they've gone well beyond having enough proof to admit
| that.
| throwaway803453 wrote:
| On a motorcycle if I am at a stop with no one behind me I am
| periodically scanning my review mirror and considering escape
| routes. If some appears to approach too fast I start flashing my
| break light until it is clear they are decelerating at a
| comfortable level.
|
| I am going to start taking a similar precaution when driving.
| I'll just flash of my hazard lights once and hopefully that
| triggers something in the driver or autopilot.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Since Tesla was hitting stationary emergency vehicles, you
| might put yourself in more danger doing that for a Tesla on
| Autopilot.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Tell your insurance company. Nobody is as motivated as them to
| make the other driver/car manufacturer/etc
| pay/hurt/apologize/etc. Then talk to reporters. Sadly in today's
| world, if it isn't trending on Twitter, it didn't happen. Sorry
|
| Hope you are physically ok and unhurt.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > Nobody is as motivated as them to make the other driver/car
| manufacturer/etc pay/hurt/apologize/etc.
|
| I don't know why you think that. Insurance companies working
| together is an iterated game with no clear end point. It makes
| all the insurance companies more money if they just settle all
| claims as quickly as possible, as long as the total money
| changing hands among all claims is correct to within the margin
| of how much much they save from not investigating.
| [deleted]
| sidibe wrote:
| Last week Tesla rolled out an update to all of its FSD beta users
| that caused rogue FCWs leading to dangerous sudden braking.
| Somehow they didn't catch this internally but most of their
| customers seemed to notice it the first day. It's clear that
| Tesla doesn't test their software enough
| belval wrote:
| I'll go against the general opinion in this thread and say that
| this is not something that I'd expect to be blamed on Tesla.
| Especially considering this:
|
| > The driver said she was using Autopilot, that an OTA update had
| had a problem earlier in the day, and that she had actually had
| the same kind of collision on Autopilot previously!
|
| Autopilot might be an absolute dumpster fire, but what you are
| describing is similar to an adaptive cruise control failure and
| the liability is still with the driver. She rear ended you while
| you were at a red light, make sure that her insurance pays and
| that's it. If she wishes to sue Tesla she can obviously do so.
| zahma wrote:
| Responsibility and who pays are certainly important, but isn't
| it equally concerning that there isn't an investigation
| initiated directly to determine if there's malfunctioning
| technology?
| belval wrote:
| At scale not really, how many cars get rear-ended daily in
| the US? Insurance companies will forward the info to another
| government body which will launch an investigation if there
| is a significant deviation from the norm.
| evv wrote:
| I have adaptive cruise control, and it behaves the exact same
| today as it did on the day I test drove the car. It doesn't
| change behavior unpredictably with OTA updates!
|
| How was the driver supposed to know that the previous issue was
| not some rare fluke?
|
| Tesla is recklessly rolling out software, and amazingly has
| pushed off the liability to the drivers willing to try it.
| Sadly we are all part of the beta, like it or not, if there are
| are Teslas driving around on public streets.
|
| I'm mostly shocked that insurance rates have not skyrocketed
| for FSD beta testers.
| belval wrote:
| To clarify, I was responding to the OP with regard to the
| "investigation" part. Authorities won't launch an
| investigation on someone rear-ending someone else on the
| basis that "autopilot did it". As a wronged individual he
| should make sure that he is properly compensated as non-
| responsible for the crash. The driver herself can (and maybe
| should!) at least contact Tesla to inquire about the whole
| thing.
|
| If truly Teslas with FSD are causing more accidents than
| another car then yes at some point some government body will
| investigate but they won't care about a single incident with
| only material damages.
| jsight wrote:
| > I have adaptive cruise control, and it behaves the exact
| same today as it did on the day I test drove the car. It
| doesn't change behavior unpredictably with OTA updates!
|
| I do too on a non-Tesla. I've seen differing behaviors not
| just due to updates but due to the time of day!
| hasdf wrote:
| I have a tesla - I could be wrong but I don't think that
| autopilot has seen any updates in quite some time. The
| exception to this is people who have the FSD Beta - this is a
| very small percentage of people who were able to get a
| impossibly high driving score. Getting into an accident would
| have made it impossible for this lady to get the FSD Beta
| MBCook wrote:
| What about done sort of civil suit for negligence? If she knew it
| was prone to this from her previous incident and let it happen
| again could that be grounds?
|
| I bet some sort of auto accident lawyer would salivate at the
| idea of suing a trillion dollar company.
| pdonis wrote:
| The negligence would be on the part of the other driver, not
| Tesla.
| deegles wrote:
| I ask this every time there's an article about Autopilot behaving
| badly and still no good answer... What is a (hypothetical)
| situation where Autopilot would definitely be responsible for an
| accident? Not brushed off as "the driver is responsible and
| should have had hands on the wheel at all times."
| conductr wrote:
| I think that's the problem, they've been allowed to legalese
| away all liability. There would have to be an OTA update so bug
| ridden that it caused multiple accidents in short order and
| with major carnage. In that instance, someone might notice the
| "trend" or public outcry would become loud enough.
| paxys wrote:
| Not until level 5 is rolled out - so potentially never.
| darthvoldemort wrote:
| NTSB and NHTSA can't investigate every single complaint. That's
| unfortunately not scalable. They would need to talk to the
| driver, talk to Tesla, get the data, etc. All for something
| that's handled through civil lawsuits. You can sue the driver
| because ultimately she is at fault, and if she wants to sue
| Tesla, that's her prerogative.
|
| This makes sense to me.
| Drunk_Engineer wrote:
| The problem is that NTSB has a bizarro prioritization scheme.
| They have spent huge efforts investigating things like hot air
| balloon crashes, and even Harrison Ford's crash landing a
| vintage airplane into a golf course. The crazier the incident,
| the more likely they investigate -- which is completely
| opposite of how they should be prioritizing. The result is that
| the common, everyday rear-end car crashes are just written off.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| It's not hard to figure out the companies themselves and
| other agency work well enough at solving the common
| reproducible errors the NTSB focuses on the edge cases that
| would otherwise go unanswered.
| Drunk_Engineer wrote:
| The US has one of the worst road safety records of any
| modern industrialized country. The reason is that other
| agencies have actually not solved the "common reproducible"
| errors at all.
| spullara wrote:
| She was probably lying.
| sleibrock wrote:
| Do you have any pictures of the accident site? Just for curiosity
| sake.
| pdonis wrote:
| If he does he shouldn't be posting them here. He should be
| giving them to his insurance company so they can go after the
| other driver's insurance company for compensation.
| buffington wrote:
| I'm confused. Digital images can be posted here AND sent to
| an insurance company. What am I missing?
| xeromal wrote:
| You could potentially post evidence against yourself if you
| posted online. It's a little shady but I don't think many
| people are ok with shooting themselves in the foot.
| pdonis wrote:
| If the images contain information that is relevant to an
| insurance claim, they probably should not be posted in a
| public forum that everyone on the Internet can see.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Does anyone have any idea about how to get this actually
| investigated to see if it was another Autopilot failure?
|
| If you want to get autopilot _in general_ invesitgated and you
| think that 's not happening enough based on your experience,
| because the thresholds used by agencies skip investigation when
| it is warranted, you should direct your complaints to Congress,
| especially your members and those on the relevant committees.
|
| This will _probably_ not, even in the case where it is part of
| triggering action, get _your_ accident invesitgated differently,
| but if your concern is general safety that 's probably not
| important.
|
| If you _really_ want your accident investigated more thoroughly,
| you'll probably have to do it yourself by gathering enough
| initial evidence to find an attorney willing to pursue it as a
| defective product liability case against Tesla. This may be
| complicated somewhat by dealing with the existing insurance
| companies involved in handling claims out of the accident, but
| that 's probably a small part of the involved challenge. On the
| other hand, your personal potential financial upside is higher in
| this case, though the likelihood of recovery may not be good.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Does it need to be investigated for you to get insurance payout?
| If not, I don't really understand your reason for asking. Non-
| software-driven rear-endings don't usually lead to investigating
| the mental stability of the driver, and so long as there isn't an
| unusually high case of accidents with this software (as in,
| higher-than-human rates)... This is n=1 for all we know, or am I
| missing any information?
| xedeon wrote:
| Here's an idea. Maybe she said she was on autopilot as a cop out?
| She could also have her foot on the accelerator which disables
| automatic stopping (clearly shown to the driver as a warning)
| when autopilot and traffic-aware cruise control (TACC) is
| engaged.
|
| If this is truly a substantiated issue. Hundreds of Tesla owners
| would have created threads on the forums below. That would
| indicate a trend which will prompt NHTSA to take action:
|
| https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/forums/-/list
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/
|
| But alas, a quick cursory search yielded nothing.
|
| There was another media frenzy a while back. Falsely claiming
| sudden unintended acceleration (SUA) on Tesla vehicles. The
| result? "NHTSA determines sudden acceleration complaints in Tesla
| vehicles were due to driver error"
|
| "There is no evidence of any fault in the accelerator pedal
| assemblies, motor control systems, or brake systems that has
| contributed to any of the cited incidents"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqTXhKVtQbU&t=203s
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/08/nhtsa-tesla-sudden-uninten...
| trollied wrote:
| This needs more visibility
| misiti3780 wrote:
| You need to be careful pointing out anything like this on HN.
| If you have havn't noticed, it's really cool to hate anything
| TSLA these days.
| xedeon wrote:
| I know anything TSLA gets some people too excited. But it
| should never be at the cost of being objective.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Anther 10 years and few thousand injured and dead, you may be
| able to collect enough statistics to interest someone in starting
| a lawsuit.
|
| Look at what it took to get acknowledgement that Pintos had a
| problem.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Talk to a good lawyer, see if you have a case to sue Tesla.
| They'll only fix this if it costs them money.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| Possible scenario A: Teslas have a fundamental flaw that causes a
| single driver to have several accidents. Multiplied by the number
| of Tesla drivers who use Autopilot, there must be hundreds of
| thousands of unreported and uninvestigated auto-pilot accidents.
| Most certainly a conspiratorial cover-up by Tesla, the NTSB, and
| the NHTSA.
|
| Possible scenario B: The driver of the Tesla has misrepresented
| or misunderstood the facts of the situation.
|
| Possible scenario C: The driver of the Tesla doesn't know that
| she should take her foot off the accelerator pedal when using
| Autopilot.
|
| I suppose any of these (or several other) scenarios are at least
| possible. I'd probably apply Hanlon's razor here before anything
| else.
| practice9 wrote:
| I would assign a large probability that Autopilot wasn't even
| engaged and it's driver's fault.
|
| Accidents with Tesla (many of those that make the press) are
| often caused by not being accustomed to the car's acceleration.
|
| There is Chill mode that decreases max acceleration, but I
| wouldn't expect the driver who manages to get into 2 accidents
| with a same car to read a manual
| filoleg wrote:
| Yeah, the first thing that came to mind was that one valet
| who claimed that it was not his fault, but the autopilot that
| made him accelerate heavily and crash inside a parking
| garage.[0]
|
| People called out bs on it instantly, as it would make no
| sense for autopilot to suddenly accelerate inside a garage
| until the crash, but the driver defended himself to death.
|
| Only for the formal investigation to happen and confirm that
| the driver did it himself by fully pressing on the
| acceleration pedal instead of the braking pedal without any
| autopilot engagement, and was just trying to shift blame. And
| no, it wasn't just Tesla's legal team claiming that. The guy
| went to a third-party service that could decode the blackbox
| data from the car (again, that was his own technician, not
| requested by Tesla or anything), and the evidence clearly
| showed that the driver pressed the accelerator full-on. The
| raw log that is relevant to the situation is included in the
| link as well, in case someone wants to see it with their
| eyes.
|
| Almost every single article I've seen that features bizarre
| accidents like this ended up being bs, and I am seeing the
| "accidentally pushed the accelerator instead of the braking
| pedal" vibes here as well. Will be eagerly awaiting for the
| results of the investigation before I make my own judgement
| though. Note: I am not claiming that autopilot is infallible,
| and there were indeed some legitimate incidents a while ago.
| But this specific one in the OP? Yeah, I call bs.
|
| 0. https://insideevs.com/news/496305/valet-crashes-tesla-
| data-r...
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Or D) Tesla stops instantly when it hits OP once by itself and
| again when the person behind it hits it.
|
| (Spare me the low effort comment about how everyone should be
| prepared for the car in front of them to stop instantly because
| it hit something, statistically nobody drives like that)
|
| Edit: I misinterpreted the OP about it being an four car
| pileup.
| raylad wrote:
| No other car hit the Tesla from behind. It hit me with two
| impacts all by itself.
| Zanni wrote:
| Dude. It's not a "low effort comment" to point that out, it's
| literally _the law_. If you can 't stop when the person in
| front of you stops, you're too close. Increase your following
| distance. Don't let others bad habits justify your own.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > If you can't stop when the person in front of you stops,
| you're too close
|
| If the other driver decides to randomly brake in the middle
| of the road (as some Teslas have been known to do), it's
| not necessarily the person behind's fault.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Yes, yes it is a low effort comment. And it is exactly what
| I was trying to preempt. It adds exactly zero to the
| conversation to say "but the law" or "but drivers ed" or
| "but some proverbial rule of thumb".
|
| For better or worse neither your fantasy of how people
| ought to act nor the letter of the law is reflective of how
| the overwhelming majority of the human population operators
| motor vehicles or expects others to. Is it ideal? Probably
| not. But it's a decent balance between being somewhat
| prepared for the expected traffic oddities, leaving margin
| for some subset of the unexpected and efficient use of road
| space.
|
| I'm sure this will be an unpopular comment because there is
| no shortage of people here who think humans adhere to laws
| the way a network switch adheres to its configuration but
| the reality is that there is not perfect alignment between
| how reasonable traffic participants behave and the letter
| of the law.
| Zanni wrote:
| You could have pre-empted it by not making such a claim
| in the first place, and I abhor your attempt to normalize
| this dangerous behavior. It is _not_ a "delicate
| balance." Increase your follow distance. Driving closer
| to the car in front of you gains you nothing but
| sacrifices valuable reaction time in the event of an
| emergency.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Take your high horse and turn it into glue. I'm not
| attempting to normalize anything. Look outside, it's
| already normalized. It is the current status quo. I'm not
| endorsing it. I'm simply asking you to not to pretend
| otherwise so you can pretend to be outraged at someone
| who failed to avoid an accident because they were driving
| like typical people drive.
| trav4225 wrote:
| I think that some of us would argue that these are not
| "reasonable traffic participants". People who do not
| maintain sufficient stopping distance are one of the most
| frustrating parts of the American driving experience and
| are (IMO) extremely disruptive to safe travel, especially
| on highways.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >I think that some of us would argue that these are not
| "reasonable traffic participants"
|
| You're basically arguing that (almost) everyone else is
| unreasonable. That's going to be a very uphill argument.
|
| >People who do not maintain sufficient stopping distance
|
| Who defines "sufficient" because the consensus based on
| the observed behavior of typical traffic seems to be that
| "sufficient" is a few seconds where possible but always
| less than whatever the comments section on the internet
| thinks it should be
|
| >American driving experience
|
| The american driving experience is not particularly
| remarkable compared (except maybe in its low cost)
| compared to other developed nations. All of which are
| pretty tame compared to developing nations
|
| I'm not asking you to like the way people drive. I'm just
| asking you to not assess traffic incidents based on the
| farcical assumption that most participants are following
| or can be expected to be following whatever rules are on
| paper.
| raylad wrote:
| One concern I would like investigated is that it appears
| Tesla's Autopilot can't detect (or can no longer detect?)
| stationary objects.
|
| Until fairly recently, I believe that the RADAR, which used to
| be in all their cars, would have detected the stationary object
| (me) and applied braking force to at least reduce the impact.
|
| Now, though, Tesla has stopped installing RADARs in their cars
| and apparently also disabled existing RADAR in cars that have
| it (because they all are using the same camera-only software).
|
| If this has also removed the ability to detect stationary
| objects and the corresponding emergency braking functionality,
| this is a really serious problem and needs to be addressed,
| perhaps with a recall to require installation of RADAR in all
| the new cars and re-enabling of it.
| krisoft wrote:
| Radar is not good for detecting stationary objects. Of course
| you get a nice reflection back from a stationary car but you
| get a similarly nice reflection from an overhead trafic light
| or a manhole cover or a dropped nail. Because of this every
| automotive radar ever fielded gates out the stationary
| objects. If you wouldn't you would get a crazy amount of
| false positives.
|
| They can do this because the radar measures the relative
| speed of objects via dopler shift, and you know the speed of
| your own vehicle. Anything which has the same speed as you
| have but goes in the other direction is most likely
| stationary. (Or moving perpendicular to you. The velocity
| difference is vectorial, but dopler can only observe the
| component along the observation vector, and civilian radars
| have terrible angular resolution.)
|
| In short: nobody ever used radar to stop cars from hitting
| stationary objects. This is not a Tesla specific thing.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| > Until fairly recently, I believe that the RADAR, which used
| to be in all their cars, would have detected the stationary
| object (me) and applied braking force to at least reduce the
| impact.
|
| It is the other way around. They've stopped using RADAR
| because RADAR has too many false reflections at speed and it
| was causing learning issues in the ML dataset. The vision
| based position detection is better (could argue about weather
| and visibility here, but it is irrelevant to this convo).
| Reliance on RADAR was causing it to hit stopped objects,
| because it was relying on radar data that was already too
| jittery and had to be ignored.
|
| Regardless of the RADAR issue, the driver is responsible for
| the vehicle at all times. If someone hits you using cruise
| control they remain at fault.
| raylad wrote:
| Nearly every major manufacturer has a separate emergency
| stop system that continually looks for an obstacle in the
| vehicle's path and applies braking force, overriding the
| driver and any cruise control or self-driving that is in
| use.
|
| These often use RADAR, have worked for years, and are
| routinely tested by international agencies such as the
| IIHS.
|
| See, for example:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJgUiZgX5rE
|
| Teslas at least used to do this too:
|
| https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/performance-of-
| pedestrian-c...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJJfn2tO5fo
|
| If Teslas no longer have this functionality, is a serious
| problem that needs to be corrected. That could mean
| reprogramming existing cameras or adding a sensor if the
| system really did rely on the now-removed RADAR.
| yupper32 wrote:
| > If someone hits you using cruise control they remain at
| fault.
|
| That'd be relevant if they didn't call it autopilot. If
| they called it lane assist or cruise control plus or
| something then I'd agree.
|
| Tesla is at major fault for implying that the Teslas can
| drive themselves, even if the driver is also at fault.
| mwint wrote:
| Tesla could call it Egre-MuzzFlorp and it wouldn't
| matter. The surveys showing people think "autopilot"
| means "can drive itself" were fatally flawed, in that
| they were done with _non-Tesla owners_.
| yupper32 wrote:
| And yet, people drive their Teslas as if it means "can
| drive itself".
|
| Words matter. You'd need real evidence to convince me
| that Tesla calling the system "Autopilot" hasn't
| significantly contributed to crashes.
| mwint wrote:
| On the contrary, we need real evidence suggesting it
| does. Certainly the population level crash data doesn't
| support it.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If an at-fault Tesla hits me, my legal beef is with the
| driver of that Tesla. They may in turn rely on insurance
| or on suing Tesla to recover damages from their own
| misunderstanding of the car's abilities or improper
| marketing, but my beef remains with the driver of the at-
| fault vehicle.
| awfml wrote:
| I think its probably more likely the driver made a user
| error-- tens of thousands of people use autopilot every day
| in stop and go traffic
| raylad wrote:
| Stop and go traffic is not the same.
|
| In stop and go traffic, the car in front of you is visible
| to the camera at all times.
|
| In this case, my car may not have been acquired by the
| camera before it was already stationary, in which case it
| might have been ignored, causing the accident.
| xeromal wrote:
| We won't know until the lady provides you with evidence
| that her AP was actually on, but my guess is that she
| fucked up and she's just using AP to offset blame.
| raylad wrote:
| Exactly: An investigation would find out what happened.
| practice9 wrote:
| Please post an update when the investigation concludes
| jsight wrote:
| To be fair to scenario A, I've seen one other video of a driver
| reporting AP hitting the car in front of them during a rapid
| slowdown in traffic. Its hard to say how widespread it is, if
| the NHTSA isn't wanting to investigate.
| [deleted]
| jdavis703 wrote:
| If Tesla, NTSB and NHTSA refuse to investigate, you could hire a
| lawyer who's willing to go after Tesla specifically. I've
| similarly been stonewalled by Lyft. Long story short, the driver
| was fiddling with the official Lyft app that sends notifications
| during revenue service when the driver caused a 3-car pile up.
|
| Be careful, a lot car crash lawyers just want an easy pay day by
| hounding the insurance companies. Make sure your lawyer is on the
| same page as you.
| esalman wrote:
| I'm happy to be driving on the road with other human drivers and
| have them crash into me. As long as I can prove I was not at
| fault, I can expect fair compensation. It seems if robots crash
| into me, I cannot expect fair compensation because whoever
| programmed the robot can't be held accountable!
| jmpman wrote:
| I have a Model 3. The autopilot was acting weird while driving on
| the freeway, sometime disengaging, but mostly not tracking the
| lane smoothly. For an unrelated reason, I opted to view my camera
| footage, and was shocked to find that my camera was completely
| blurry. I'm driving down the freeway at 75mph, being guided by a
| camera that couldn't pass a standard driver's vision test.
|
| Tesla came out to replace the camera, and it appeared that a film
| had been deposited on the windshield, obscuring the camera.
|
| Living in Phoenix, my car is parked outside, facing south west.
| During Covid, I'd go many days at a time without driving, and in
| the summer, the interior temperatures can easily rise over 150f.
| Within the camera enclosure, there's a reflection absorbing
| material, which likely creates a perfect miniature greenhouse.
|
| I believe the glue in the camera housing melted/evaporated at
| these elevated temperatures and deposited on the windshield.
|
| Concerned that others would experience this problem, I opened a
| case with the NHTSA. Crickets.
|
| There could be many people driving around on autopilot, with
| obstructed vision, due to this same failure mode. It's something
| Tesla could easily check, and something NHTSA should be
| investigating.
|
| For something as safety critical as a forward facing camera,
| you'd expect both Tesla and NHTSA would be investigating. I have
| no indication that anything has happened as a result of my
| filing. Possibly because nobody else has reported the issue -
| maybe because nobody else is actively viewing their camera
| footage? There's no other way for a Tesla owner to be aware of
| the issue. Frustrating.
| raylad wrote:
| This does sound like something that should be the subject of a
| recall investigation.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| I wonder if the US government is afraid to kill their golden
| goose like what happened with Boeing.
|
| EV is the future and China is moving fast.
| stfp wrote:
| EV != Tesla and Tesla != Autopilot Also maybe hydrogen is
| the future?
| outworlder wrote:
| > Also maybe hydrogen is the future
|
| It definitely isn't if we are going to move away from
| fossil fuels.
| gumby wrote:
| You can get H+ by cracking water. You "just" need a
| source of cheap energy.
|
| Storage is tough -- those protons are really tiny and
| it's hard to keep them from escaping
| outworlder wrote:
| > You can get H+ by cracking water. You "just" need a
| source of cheap energy.
|
| Well aware. But we don't have a source of cheap energy.
| And guess what, whatever source of energy we have, it is
| very wasteful to produce hydrogen.
|
| First, you need electrolysis. Around 80% efficient.
| However, in order to get any usable amount of energy per
| volume out of it, you need to either compress hydrogen
| (using more power) or liquefy it (way more power, boiloff
| problems).
|
| Now you need to transport it, physically. This uses more
| power, usually with some big trucks driving around, just
| as we have today with gasoline and diesel.
|
| This will get stored into some gas station equivalent.
| All the while losing mass, as those protons are hard to
| store, indeed.
|
| Now you can drive your vehicle and refill. Some
| inefficiencies here too but we can ignore them unless you
| need to travel long distances to refuel.
|
| This hydrogen will generally be used in a fuel cell. The
| output of the fuel cell is... electrical energy (+water)
|
| You could skip all that, use the electricity from the
| power grid to directly charge batteries. No hydrogen
| production plants needed, no container challenges, no
| diffusing through containers and embrittlement to worry
| about. No trucks full of hydrogen going around.
| Electricity is found almost everywhere, even in places
| where there's little gas infrastructure.
|
| Mind you, hydrogen has another disadvantage, other than
| thermodynamics: it ensures control is kept with the
| existing energy companies. We would still need to rely on
| their infrastructure to refill our cars (much like gas
| stations). They would like to keep it this way.
| Ultimately it doesn't really matter what's the fuel we
| are using, as long as we keep driving to gas stations.
| nameisname wrote:
| Can't renewables produce hydrogen?
| outworlder wrote:
| They can. But overwhelmingly, they do not. It's much
| cheaper to extract hydrogen from fossil fuels and that's
| not likely to change any time soon.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| All major car companies manufacture EVs. Off the top of my
| head, I've seen BMW, Prius (Toyota), Honda electric cars
| outside recently.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Genuine question, what temperature are cars expected to be
| stored at safely? I'm not talking about engine temperature,
| just literally the room temperate of the garage. I'm not
| wanting to excuse or accuse anyone here, but are cars
| supposed to be manufactured such that they can sit in 150F
| garages for days at a time without any maintenance?
| xwdv wrote:
| Your garage is not 150F, and certainly not for _days_ at a
| time.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Indeed mine certainly is not, but apparently the parent
| commenter's routinely reaches 150F.
| tyingq wrote:
| That's odd since Tesla seems proud of their AI expertise. Isn't
| something like "image is blurred" a fairly pedestrian (heh)
| exercise? Especially given that you would have related data,
| like what speed the car is going, if you're parked, etc.
| slg wrote:
| They do report if the camera can't get a good image. Glare
| from the sun is the most common reason. It is certainly
| possible that there is a window between when vision is
| degraded enough to be dangerous and when it alerts the
| driver, but a single occurrence isn't proof of a widescale
| problem. That is the type of thing that should be
| investigated in more depth, but it is hard to get anyone to
| care when it is only a theory that isn't even yet connected
| to a single accident.
| coryrc wrote:
| > was shocked to find that my camera was completely blurry
|
| They maybe don't need to figure out how it got blurry.
|
| But their testing regime is sad if it continues to work when it
| can't see!
| soheil wrote:
| There are several cameras for redundancy. The car also doesn't
| need crystal clear vision to drive. What may seem like a blurry
| image to human eye with simple filtering can become much more
| visible. It also doesn't need to see details, but rather needs
| to detect if there are any objects in the way or where the lane
| markings are.
| screye wrote:
| Tesla and Carelessness, name a better duo.
|
| From removing radar from their cars [1] to having their $200k
| super car be criminally underbraked. [2]
|
| Tesla has a low regard for human life, and exemplifies the
| worst of silicon valley's progress at any cost approach. Elon
| is undeniably intelligent, but his ethics are dangerously
| sidelined by his need to create products that might not be
| ready yet.
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-
| transportation/tesla-...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn9QWjxFPKM
| vasco wrote:
| I don't know much about this but wasn't Tesla getting safety
| award after safety award in testing and that translating into
| lower insurance rates?
| toast0 wrote:
| Doing well in crash tests means the car does well in those
| specific scenarios, but may not mean much about other
| safety issues.
| 420official wrote:
| My understanding is that they are safe in the event of a
| crash, not that they have the best crash avoidance.
| adventured wrote:
| The first several model years of the Model S were generally
| considered to be among the safest vehicles in the history
| of automobiles.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-tesla-model-s-
| achieves...
| moffkalast wrote:
| And they probably still are, along with the rest of the
| models.
|
| Assuming you're actually the one driving them that is,
| and not a broken ass camera.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| Tesla doesnt make a $200K car.......
| bronzeage wrote:
| It's also a problem that the camera could have degraded vision
| that's inadequate for self driving yet report no problem at all
| and continue driving as if everything's fine.
|
| I'm pretty sure your situation isn't the only way the vision
| can be obstructed, maybe liquids, or even bird poop can also
| degrade vision.
| bscphil wrote:
| This is what I would expect as well. Some kind of visual
| self-test, and if/when it fails, the driver gets an obvious
| warning and autopilot does not engage - you get some kind of
| clearly visible warning so that you can contact Tesla to
| investigate / repair the obstruction.
| servercobra wrote:
| This does happen, but maybe not in all cases. I've had it
| happen where lane change is no longer supported (and you
| get a notification) because the sun is blinding one of the
| pillar cameras.
| jader201 wrote:
| Meanwhile, TSLA is up 52% over the past 30 days, and 200% over
| the last year.
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| Does that magically make it safe? I don't get the connection.
| gatlin wrote:
| My charitable read of the GP comment is that they are
| pointing out how ludicrous the stock increase is, but
| that's my reading. Side note, how much attention does your
| username usually garner you?
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| None typically. I don't think anyone has made the
| connection, publicly anyways, since I've started using
| it.
| gumby wrote:
| I think the point is that Tesla investors and customers
| don't care about safety, either for the passengers or as an
| externality.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I think he's referring to the naive idea that stock prices
| in general are somehow influenced by what a company is
| doing and are not pure speculation.
| a-dub wrote:
| i have questions.
|
| 1) how high of a speed, exactly?
|
| 2) it rear ended you twice? as in it smacked into you, decided
| that wasn't enough and either waited for you to pull forward or
| for the cars to separate and then accelerated into you again? if
| it actually did this, this is downright comical. i'd wager the
| driver was involved in the second collision though. (which should
| be considered a failure of the system nonetheless, as
| driver+autopilot operate as a single system, where if the state
| of the system leaves the bewildered driver manually accelerating
| the car into a collision, that is still a degenerate state!)
| juanani wrote:
| This is what regulatory capture looks like. Barricades to get the
| proper authorities to regulate. But omg buy T$LA
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-01 23:02 UTC)