[HN Gopher] A Tesla vehicle using 'Smart Summon' appears to cras...
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A Tesla vehicle using 'Smart Summon' appears to crash into a $3.5mm
private jet
Author : aaronbrethorst
Score : 105 points
Date : 2022-04-22 19:27 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| almost_usual wrote:
| Rich people problems
| amelius wrote:
| Until it crashes into some poor person's car.
| badwolf wrote:
| or some poor person.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Tesla owner's insurance or the Tesla owner will pay for it,
| just as would happen in this case. No different than you
| leaving the parking brake off and the vehicle rolling down
| the hill into another car or someone's house.
| amelius wrote:
| What if the poor person was injured?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Liability coverage.
| [deleted]
| ceejayoz wrote:
| A plane would be _well_ over most folks ' car insurance
| limits.
| coolspot wrote:
| It's not like the whole $3.5MM jet is a write-off.
|
| The hull damage and re-certification should be a fraction
| of the plane cost.
| _s wrote:
| Composite fuselage - and the jet engine ($$$) itself sits
| between the ruddervators ($$$), with the BRS ($$$) just
| in front - probably the worst place to hit that jet.
| Easily $1-1.5M.
|
| A wing or the nose would have been far easier to inspect
| and replace.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| We were talking about other cars, not $3.5M jets, in the
| subthread.
|
| > Until it crashes into some poor person's car.
|
| With that said, Tesla or not, you're going to have a bad
| time if you hit a private jet with your car at the
| airport (unless you live in a state where you can just go
| bankrupt and protect your assets if they attempt to
| pursue you beyond your insurance limits).
| mannykannot wrote:
| If they don't drive off before anyone notices.
| yeetsfromhellL2 wrote:
| Yeah but think of the wealth that could have trickled down to
| the middle class and eventually the lower class because of that
| jet ferrying the rich around to distribute their money as they
| see fit. Any conscious working class person would have thrown
| themselves in the way of that Tesla in the name of economic
| justice. The hospital bill would surely have been a crushing
| financial blow to him or her, and probably left them bankrupt,
| and also crippled, but what a boon to their class they would
| have preserved. Perhaps sympathetic workers could have donated
| to their cause, and to repair and clean the Tesla.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| /s?
| PawBer wrote:
| Looks like they didn't teach the model about airplanes.
| sorokod wrote:
| Perhaps should be a warning on the label. Something like:
|
| "Training corpus did not include airplanes, people in wheel
| chairs,..."
| lordnacho wrote:
| Models need to generalize over what they've been shown
| though. Most people won't learn to drive near an airplane or
| a wheelchair either, but would have no problem avoiding
| those.
| trhway wrote:
| Humans generate general 3d representation of the world. You
| don't know what this object is, yet you see it's borders.
| Tesla seems to generate understanding only of the objects
| that it has already seen.
| rasz wrote:
| "...any animals, ..."
| twayt wrote:
| That is going to be an infinitely long warning label
| pessimizer wrote:
| They can post it on all of your doors as a TOS for leaving
| the house. If you want to sue, you'll have to prove you
| climbed out of the window.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Aggravating edge cases: you use the feature in an environment
| where not even 0.01% (optimistically) of drivers will drive
| salawat wrote:
| If your ML was half as generalized as you make it out to be
| it would not be a problem.
| lm28469 wrote:
| There are a lot of 0.01% cases when you have 600k+ tesla
| driving out there... and it's only the beginning
| trhway wrote:
| I can imagine a PM meeting at Tesla triaging the issues -
| "severe bug, yet very rare, waiving it for this release."
|
| One can also imagine their modelers populating the synthetic
| training world with all of the planes right now. Like a "Mria"
| coming right in front of you on 101, as well as F-35 passing
| you on the left, and of course Millennium Falcon dropping right
| on you, and all that happening on a flight deck of huge
| aircraft carrier.
| hu3 wrote:
| Insurance call: "Sorry you said you crashed on what?"
| nimbius wrote:
| summon is the wildest energy. its like handing your keys to a
| feral racoon on bath salts.
|
| i once had to file a claim after a tesla on summon backed out of
| its parking space and directly over my motorcycle, crushing it
| against a barrier wall with such unrelenting force it pushed the
| cylinder head covers into the gas tank. this claim was a real tit
| spanner because the owners cut-rate insurance company flat-out
| refused to cover it since the driver wasnt in the car. it took
| nearly a year of subrogation but mercifully they settled.
| biggc wrote:
| > since the driver wasnt in the car.
|
| That's shocking. What does that have to do with liability?
| Hypothentically if my car's brakes failed while my car was
| parked, my insurance should cover any damages.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I wonder if they'd refuse to cover damage from their client's
| car rolling down a hill in neutral, hitting another car, only
| because the owner wasn't in it.
| noneeeed wrote:
| Well that's disturbing. It doesn't bode well for how they are
| building their self-driving systems. A simple set of ultrasonic
| reversing sensors would be enough to prevent this.
| judge2020 wrote:
| The part of the jet it hit was in the air, the ultrasonic
| sensors are the main way it avoids hitting non-car objects in
| Smart Summon, and they have those all around the car.
| rasz wrote:
| Jet crushed the upper windshield right in the spot where
| Tesla hides its monocular camera cluster.
| throwanem wrote:
| I feel like there must be some way to detect and avoid
| objects that occlude space the car intends to occupy but
| that also don't touch the ground inside that footprint.
| byw wrote:
| Maybe a lidar would've prevented these types of issues.
| judge2020 wrote:
| But how often is a car at risk of not clearing something
| in a parking lot? I don't think they should be adding
| cost (manufacturing complexity, material/part cost) to
| specifically handle driving around a runway.
| ipython wrote:
| Not a Tesla, just a plain old fuckup on my part - I
| backed into a fan box mounted about 3' off the ground in
| a parking garage. Was too reliant on cameras and the
| backup radar- didn't look and boom - nice big crease in
| my rear panel. So yes this sort of thing is not some sort
| of crazy edge case only encountered on airport tarmacs.
| ruined wrote:
| there are no rules about what kind of objects can exist
| in a parking lot. if they can't account for hanging
| obstructions, which are actually quite frequent
| everywhere, they probably should err on the side of "less
| likely to kill people" and just not offer it.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Other vehicles can be pretty far off the ground
| sometimes, and while I don't know if summon can avoid
| those, autopilot sure doesn't.
| [deleted]
| throwanem wrote:
| I feel like if you need to think about a case like this
| for its own sake then there may be some more fundamental
| problem with your approach.
|
| I bet it'd work great on Mars, though. Not a whole lot of
| airplanes there, now or in the foreseeable future.
| atchoo wrote:
| Hitting a partially lowered garage door seems the most
| likely.
| hosh wrote:
| Tesla is known to play fast and loose with their driver
| assist and autonomous vehicel tech and insist on avoiding
| lidar. Waymo and Cruise are a lot more conservative.
|
| As a society, we have not figured out who is liable in cases
| like this -- the owner or the car company that engineered the
| AI.
| throwawaycities wrote:
| > As a society, we have not figured out who is liable in
| cases like this -- the owner or the car company that
| engineered the AI.
|
| For the most part none of this is novel to the law.
|
| So long as the owner didn't do anything negligent
| themselves, then it seems a strong claim of product
| liability (defective product). It seems there is very
| little chance of contributory negligence of the owner with
| this function, unlike crashes in self-drive mode, where the
| driver was supposed to pay attention and maintain their
| hands on the wheel, but turns out they were sleeping or in
| the backseat live streaming.
|
| I do think there should be legislation adopted to protect
| the victims by giving them a statutory private right of
| action against both the owner and the car manufacturer to
| hold them jointly and severally liable for any accident
| involving self driving vehicles, then in practice the
| owner/manufacturer (i.e. their insurance companies) to sort
| out liability.
| veilrap wrote:
| I've read that Tesla's summon feature requires the user
| to continually hold down a button on their phone in order
| to have the car continue its slow progress in driving
| towards the user.
|
| Assuming that's the case, I would argue that this
| specific sort of accident is squarely in the domain of
| the user.
| threeseed wrote:
| It borders on reckless than Tesla isn't using LiDAR or a
| similar sensor.
|
| Relying on images only requires you to perfectly identify
| every object in the scene in order to infer its bounding
| box. And that's an issue like we see here where you don't
| expect to see private jets near a Tesla and so it may not
| be modelled.
|
| With LiDAR, Radar etc. at least they know "something" is
| there even if they don't know what is.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| You shouldn't need to identify objects using images, just
| that the parallax shift indicates something there.
| csa wrote:
| Tesla says that the owner is supposed to be able to see the
| car during all parts of the summon procedure precisely to
| prevent situations like this. Tesla knows that this system is
| not perfect.
|
| Fwiw, the best use of summon is simply getting out of a tight
| parking spot (e.g., some residential garages).
|
| Expecting it to be a valet is ambitious in its current state.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >this claim was a real tit spanner because the owners cut-rate
| insurance company flat-out refused to cover it since the driver
| wasnt in the car
|
| WTF, I'm against self-driving cars now. Glad you're all right.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _this claim was a real tit spanner because the owners cut-
| rate insurance company flat-out refused to cover it since the
| driver wasnt in the car._
|
| I thought the official dogma was that when self-driving cars
| were in "auto-mode" the manufacturers would be the parties held
| responsible/liable and pay for any damages cause by their
| systems.
| csa wrote:
| > I thought the official dogma was that when self-driving
| cars were in "auto-mode" the manufacturers would be the
| parties held responsible/liable and pay for any damages cause
| by their systems.
|
| See my response here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31129075
|
| tl;dr -- Tesla states the driver is responsible when using
| this feature.
| tantalor wrote:
| _forced arbitration has entered the chat_
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Only in the US, in Europa that wouldn't pass consumer
| protection laws.
| csa wrote:
| I'm surprised that it took so long.
|
| Tesla says that the car should be in sight during the whole
| summon procedure precisely so things like this don't happen.
|
| https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-6B9A1AE...
|
| "You must maintain a clear line of sight between you and Model
| 3 and closely monitor the vehicle and its surroundings at all
| times."
|
| "Smart Summon is a BETA feature. You must continually monitor
| the vehicle and its surroundings and stay prepared to take
| immediate action at any time. It is the driver's responsibility
| to use Smart Summon safely, responsibly, and as intended."
|
| I'm surprised that this was not a slam dunk for your insurance
| company.
| sabujp wrote:
| new feature: auto pushback
| ProAm wrote:
| ETA to fix the airplane: 7 weeks.
|
| ETA to fix the Tesla: 37 weeks.
| mc4ndr3 wrote:
| Autonomous vehicles present a shining example of why early
| adoption is risky.
| exabrial wrote:
| One expensive luxury toy crashes into another expensive luxury
| toy...
| outworlder wrote:
| A vision jet is not necessarily a toy. Plenty of companies
| using them instead of larger aircraft.
| _moof wrote:
| Can't imagine why. The range on those things is pitiful. A
| TBM or a PC-12 seems like a much better choice if that's the
| class of aircraft you're buying.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| You know how at the airport, they have that tug vehicle that
| pushes the aircraft out from the gate and into the taxiway?
|
| I think the person was just trying to use their Tesla in the same
| way. The plane needed to be turned around, and the Telsa did it.
|
| This is actually a feature, not a bug.
|
| Instead of having to spool up the jet engine which would burn a
| lot of fuel and release a lot of CO2, the Tesla with its electric
| motor, can do it with zero CO2 emissions.
| Retric wrote:
| I wonder all the different things that needed to fail for this to
| happen.
|
| Smart summon requires someone to hold the button down as they use
| it. Did they not pay attention or did this fail to stop the car
| after they let go etc.
|
| Why didn't the car react to the aircraft? Did it not detect it,
| or did it fail to judge it's location?
|
| Did the car bit notice the collision, or is that ignored by this
| feature?
| adoxyz wrote:
| The Hold the button down is one way of using Smart Summon and
| it's not the default way. The default way has the car moving
| forward until you hit stop or it detects something in the way.
| cogman10 wrote:
| "Hold the botton down" IS the default for both summon and
| smart summon.
|
| There is also (and has always been) a shit ton of warnings
| you have to ignore to use the feature. [1]
|
| Here's a particularly applicable warning from the manual.
|
| > Smart Summon may not stop for all objects (especially very
| low objects such as some curbs, or very high objects such as
| a shelf) and may not react to all traffic. Smart Summon does
| not recognize the direction of traffic, does not navigate
| around empty parking spaces, and may not anticipate crossing
| traffic.
|
| I know a lot of people like to dig at tesla, but they really
| aggressively warn drivers when it comes to using the driver
| automation.
|
| [1] https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/is_is/GUID-6B9A
| 1AE...
| joshcryer wrote:
| For sure. But warnings don't solve complacency. You summon
| your Tesla to the front of Whole Foods successfully for
| months, go to the airport and expect the same thing. They
| think "oh these warnings are them just covering their
| butt." Which the warnings are doing. It shouldn't be called
| just "summon" it should be called "remote control summon."
| Because everything about those warnings puts you in control
| of the situation. But Tesla loves to use branding and will
| take the hit for when that branding doesn't actually meet
| its metrics.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I think that's just regular 'summon' where it'll only move
| straight forward or back, which very well might be what's
| happening in this video, but "smart summon" does require
| holding a button down on the phone. The original reddit
| comment[0] only said "someone tried to summon their Tesla".
|
| 0: https://old.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/u95dqt/someone_ju
| st...
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Why didn't the car react to the aircraft? Did it not detect
| it, or did it fail to judge it's location?
|
| Because these smart vehicles are dumb as fuck when you put them
| anywhere other than on a well maintained, sunny, first world
| country highway. Not so long ago teslas braked on the highway
| when going under signs because they thought the shadow was an
| obstacle. A few of them crashed in overturned trucks because
| they though their roof was the sky/a cloud, one even missed a
| damn firetruck and smacked into it at full speed
|
| When you have thousands of cars out there your one in a billion
| edge case will happen, this is the perfect example. A ten years
| old would have braked, the tesla didn't
| judge2020 wrote:
| I think you overestimate a 10 year old driver - even a 15
| year old on their learners might not realize that z height
| matters, unless they're learning on a tall vehicle that can't
| fit under some drive-thru overhangs.
| [deleted]
| RKearney wrote:
| > even a 15 year old on their learners might not realize
| that z height matters
|
| There are a fair share of adults that do not understand
| height while driving either. Look no further than the 12'4"
| (previously 11'8") bridge on YouTube.
| lm28469 wrote:
| The plane didn't even clear the hood, safe to assume that
| if an obstacle is at eye level you won't make it under.
| johntb86 wrote:
| > Why didn't the car react to the aircraft? Did it not detect
| it, or did it fail to judge it's location?
|
| According to
| https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/is_is/GUID-6B9A1AE...
|
| > Smart Summon may not stop for all objects (especially very
| low objects such as some curbs, or very high objects such as a
| shelf) and may not react to all traffic.
|
| The tail of the plane was quite high, so smart summon probably
| wasn't trained to recognize it.
| jdrc wrote:
| the only thing that i want self-driving is my roomba
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Are you sure about that?
|
| Pooptastrophe - https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-
| now/2016/08/15/po...
| outworlder wrote:
| Not OP but yes. Newer vacuums also have cameras to avoid this
| exact issue.
| moooo99 wrote:
| Having an autonomous and internet connected vehicle driving
| through my apartment makes me pretty uneasy.
| Victerius wrote:
| Until your Roomba crashes into the landing gear of your $3.5mm
| private jet.
| jdrc wrote:
| it will turn around and find something else to crash on
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| A common cause of hull loss in aircraft.
| 2ctJoke wrote:
| Send a few Teslas to Ukraine. The need air defence -- could work
| this way :o)
| verdverm wrote:
| This is why you should use radar and/or lidar, not just
| cameras...
| sabujp wrote:
| are you saying obstacle avoidance is impossible with multiple
| cameras (yes probably not as robust)? Is it not possible to
| tell the difference between an image artifact / shadows and
| actual solid object?
| dboreham wrote:
| Much harder. Animals manage it, most of the time.
| MBCook wrote:
| The problem with radar is it can't see up high right? Just low
| to the ground where the unit is?
|
| Based on this video I'm not sure the radar would've had
| anything to catch. It seems like the plane hit the top of the
| car, not that the car hit the landing gear.
| _moof wrote:
| Radar can see wherever it's pointed. Point it up and it'll
| see up.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Without even knowing how their internals work, I can
| guarantee that the bug in their software is that they don't
| check for height clearance, because it's not needed in 99.99%
| of the situations.
|
| However, I do think radar should have caught it, because
| radar has almost like a cone like view in front. If the car
| was far enough, the cone would've spotted the height.
| outworlder wrote:
| How well is a front-facing radar going to see a Vision Jet,
| considering it's higher up and mostly composites?
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| So if a human were driving the car, they would have crashed
| into the plane? Humans don't have radar or lidar.... and
| probably worse vision than the cameras on a Tesla have... but
| probably wouldn't have hit the plane.
|
| There may well be valid arguments for radar/lidar superiority
| over cameras, but the line of reasoning you're suggesting isn't
| in that category.
| serf wrote:
| humans are mobile, with moving necks/torso/eyes/etc.
|
| I don't think anyone would argue that cameras couldn't do the
| same job if capable of realizing depth and re-assessing from
| different angles when confronted with ambiguity... but show
| me what a system like that would look like.
|
| A human that is parking somewhere ambiguously often gets out
| of their car to inspect the area with their binocular vision
| from multiple angles; this is common among trailer owners.
|
| The vision system on a vehicle is tasked with a harder
| problem in many ways -- it's trying to solve the ambiguity of
| the scene purely visually with mostly-stationary cameras and
| prior knowledge.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > moving necks/torso/eyes/etc
|
| > realizing depth and re-assessing from different angles
|
| A car with three or four widely spaced cameras can get way
| better visual information than a human can. (At least in
| the forward direction. Add more cameras for 360.) To the
| point that you could probably give the human a VR set tied
| into the cameras and have them do a _better_ job if you
| make the pillars transparent. (Might need a special VR set
| with extra-high field of view.)
| servercobra wrote:
| Smart Summon does use radar. Last I checked it's disabled on
| vision-only Teslas. I wouldn't use until it uses the new FSD
| stack, because even with radar it is not good.
| opendomain wrote:
| Tesla has radar but it is disabled? why is that?
| atchoo wrote:
| Removed from newer models due to part shortages / cost
| reduction. The software function removed from models with
| the hardware for consistency / to give the false impression
| that it wasn't a useful sensor and that the cars are not
| going backwards in capability.
| boboche wrote:
| I was thinking the same way a year ago and telling my fanboy
| tesla friend how stupid it was removing lidars etc., but being
| open minded and always looking to be challenged, I started
| researching what they are doing and how they are doing it,
| watch their AI day video (its old in AI terms but gives a good
| insight), and I eventually got what they've meant when saying
| lidar introduces noise compared to what they are doing right
| now. TLDR is they convert photons into a multistereoscopic
| camera and reconstructing the brain's behavior towards objects
| and motion...the way they transform the image data into high
| quality 3d point clouds is really mindblowing, people outside
| of the 3d ecosystem cannot fully appreciate that, and its kind
| of sad.
|
| The camera performance is like the newer starlight sensors in
| terms of seeing in the dark, and they seem to process from raw
| data. Essentially, once they crack all the quirks, I am now a
| firm beleiver that it will better than the average joe with
| limited angulars vision+rotating head vs. surround stereoscopic
| vision.
|
| Not saying I 100% agree with launching a beta program in the
| wild like this, but to their defense, given the current
| government driving paperwork and legislation to insane levels
| of unproductivity, innovators and challengers kinda have to
| play it out like that if they want to disrupt sectors (in the
| end) for the better.
|
| Not saying the end justifies the means, but I can understand
| the logic.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Humans don't just use vision when driving a car. Our eyes
| also aren't fixed in our heads. They can gimbal independently
| of our heads. Our torsos also give our heads more degrees of
| freedom than just our necks. Human senses are actually fairly
| good.
|
| The main issue with vision-only FSD is that visual artifacts
| don't convey high degrees of certainty about the solid nature
| of things.
|
| If the AI doesn't recognize an object as being an object it
| can't add it to the list of things to worry about. If it's
| augmented with LIDAR and radar it doesn't need to recognize
| an airplane to know there's a solid object in its path.
|
| It's dumb edge cases that cause problems. Vision-only FSD
| leaves a lot of edge cases on the table with the hope that AI
| magic will save the day.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > TLDR is they convert photons into a multistereoscopic
| camera and reconstructing the brain's behavior towards
| objects and motion...
|
| I think maybe someone dazzled you with some excessive jargon.
| Extracting point clouds from stereoscopic cameras isn't a
| Tesla invention, even though they've invested a lot into
| trying to make theirs work. This is some computer vision 101
| stuff, but nobody calls it "converting photons".
|
| > Essentially, once they crack all the quirks, I am now a
| firm beleiver
|
| Well obviously if they solve all of the problems then we'd
| all be believers too.
| yababa_y wrote:
| > TLDR is they convert photons into a multistereoscopic
| camera and reconstructing the brain's behavior towards
| objects and motion...
|
| I just spent the time watching the vision segment of that
| video, and while the presenter uses the brain as a simile to
| motivate neural network architecture, it actually is not
| modeled at all on how primate visual cortex works. Seems some
| tweeps also got caught up in this hype. I think those few
| slides were really just to show the complexity of the
| problem.
|
| For parties interested in actual models of biological vision,
| https://serre-lab.clps.brown.edu/wp-
| content/uploads/2014/10/... is a good resource.
| lkxijlewlf wrote:
| That's gonna leave a mark...
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Further discussion here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31123074
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