[HN Gopher] Tesla on autopilot rear ends motorcycle on freeway, ...
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Tesla on autopilot rear ends motorcycle on freeway, killing rider
Author : justsomedood
Score : 40 points
Date : 2022-07-24 20:20 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ksl.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ksl.com)
| coldtea wrote:
| What matters is the ratio of autopilot vs human driver accidents.
|
| Actually, scratch that: what matter is that the autopilot sounds
| cool and high tech. Given that, who cares about the casualties?
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| I always think it's weird how instead of just improving public
| transit, we've all become fixated on self driving vehicles. Good
| transit would mean most people don't need to operate a vehicle
| while having a plethora of other benefits like combating climate
| change and more efficient land use (if you live in a suburb, take
| note of the sheer amount land dedicated to parking; it's often
| more land than the store for retail).
|
| The problem is kind of similar to people who insist on some
| overly complicated microservice architecture when a monolith
| would be a much better fit. I actually hope that self driving
| technology stagnates, at least until we can start designing
| cities for people and not just cars.
|
| I live near where the accident occurred and there is definitely
| sufficient population to support alternatives to driving.
| thehappypm wrote:
| I doubt "we" can really fix public transit. The places where
| it's great have an immense culture towards it. Here even places
| where the public transit network is extensive like NYC or
| Boston still face huge funding shortfalls and a lot of
| antagonism from their statehouses. Maybe self driving cars is
| an easier problem.
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| Transit is not a replacement for cars in USA outside of the
| densest urban cores, and those areas are paradoxically the
| worst offenders for crime, drugs, and other urban issues which
| keep many off of transit.
| [deleted]
| pawsforthought wrote:
| Your analogy to microservices is apt. It's unchecked
| technologism at its worst.
|
| We already have the solutions for the future of transport, but
| they're not sexy like self-driving cars, and they don't prop up
| the auto industry. Walking, bikes, buses, trams, metros,
| combined with more dense mixed-use zoning everywhere.
| skybrian wrote:
| It doesn't seem like all that many people are all that crazy
| about self-driving cars? It's a frequent topic of conversation
| because some companies have invested a lot of money in it. But
| people express fairly negative sentiments about it.
|
| Meanwhile, huge amounts of money is spent on improving mass
| transit. It's fairly conventional wisdom that it's a good
| thing. (The money doesn't seem to go very far though, compared
| to the need.)
| ideamotor wrote:
| To a programmer every problem looks like a software problem.
| Information technology tends to free ride on public goods,
| essentially profiting from commons without contributing to
| them. That's the feedback loop that is lacking. The negative
| externality, if you will, that should be brought in.
|
| If, let's say ubers and taxis paid a tax when they rode around
| without passengers and that tax specifically went to road
| upkeep and construction, that would close the gap. But this
| takes policy change, and engineers not only cannot
| independently make that fix in a democracy; they think they
| know better than democracy because they know how to program a
| car in a simulated road in abstraction.
|
| So, not only is the focus often misplaced towards IT solutions,
| those IT solutions often accelerate the underlying problem.
| Whereas there are policy solutions but they require smart young
| politicians and just flat getting out the vote and encouraging
| optimism for progress through an imperfect but best available
| democratic system.
|
| Lets not let the amazingly fast capability of modern IT lead to
| us to compare that with the more difficult democratic process
| and lose faith in the more equitable practice of democracy. And
| let us be humble enough to know when we personally are not
| subject matter experts.
| rvz wrote:
| Oh dear. It's getting really hard for anyone to defend this
| contraption. Perhaps that explains the silence from the Tesla
| autopilot crowd shocked by the news of this yet another collision
| from an unsafe piece of 'safety critical' software.
|
| Both Autopilot and FSD (Fools Self Driving) needs to be
| investigated urgently.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > The car's autopilot was on at the time of the crash, UHP said.
|
| I wonder whether the UHP pulled data from the car to verify this,
| or just took the driver's word for it.
| geoah wrote:
| The driver is still liable right? Is it still the driver's
| responsibility or keeping aware and ready to react or is the
| autopilot software allowed to autonomously drive these days?
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Tesla should be liable by virtue of calling things
| 'autopilot' or 'full self driving' which aren't.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| This is possibly the dumbest argument against Tesla one
| could make.
|
| From the origin of autopilot from its aviation history, its
| pretty clear that autopilot was not designed to prevent you
| from hitting things.
| treesprite82 wrote:
| Something that just flies an aircraft straight and level is
| still an autopilot, so I don't think it's a totally
| inaccurate metaphor.
|
| Ironically in these situations a more understated name
| would probably work better for PR. Headline of _" Tesla on
| cruise control rear ends motorcycle on freeway, killing
| rider"_ gives a much stronger impression of it being the
| driver's fault.
| moralestapia wrote:
| You bring up a valid argument but, unfortunately, it cuts
| both ways.
|
| Aircraft manufacturers _are liable_ when their vehicles
| crash due to malfunction.
| josephcsible wrote:
| The driver is indeed still liable (since it's only a level 2
| system), but that seems like the kind of thing that a lot of
| people would lie about anyway.
| simonh wrote:
| They wouldn't get away with it though as the car logs that
| sort of thing.
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