[HN Gopher] Tesla's Autopilot involved in far more crashes than ...
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Tesla's Autopilot involved in far more crashes than previously
known
Author : abawany
Score : 49 points
Date : 2023-06-11 20:04 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.seattletimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.seattletimes.com)
| martin_a wrote:
| > Authorities said Yee had fixed weights to the steering wheel to
| trick Autopilot into registering the presence of a driver's hands
|
| Wow, just wow. People, don't do stupid stuff like this with
| security features.
| kristianp wrote:
| I'm wondering about the school bus story here, as a non-USA
| person. Does the school bus display flashing warning lights to
| indicate that a child is crossing in front of the bus while it is
| stationary? Seems like a dangerous situation (that the driver
| should have slowed for). Is crossing in front of the bus really
| safer than making the child cross after the bus has departed?
| paxys wrote:
| School buses display flashing red lights when they stop.
| Traffic on both sides of the road have to wait till the lights
| are turned off, whether anyone is crossing or not.
| vel0city wrote:
| Where I am, when school busses make a stop to pickup/dropoff
| kids it does a lot of signaling. Big red lights at the top
| blink, a stop sign with lights flips out from the side. It is
| against the law to pass a school bus when it's lights are on in
| this configuration from either direction. I've heard of
| districts equipping cameras on busses where there are incidents
| of illegal passing like this.
|
| Also, back in the day there was a little barrier that would
| flip out hinged on the passenger side that would attempt to
| prevent kids from walking out in front of the bus, at least so
| close that the bus driver couldn't reasonably see. I don't know
| if those are still common or not.
| papercrane wrote:
| Typically the bus has a stop sign with flashing lights that
| automatically swings out when the bus driver opens the doors.
| The law in most places in North America is that it is illegal
| to pass the school bus when students are embarking or
| disembarking, so in practice it is safer for the students to
| cross the street while the school bus is there.
|
| Image of a typical North American school bus:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_bus_traffic_stop_laws...
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| The real number may be far higher.
|
| Somebody bothered to make website to track Tesla deaths and Tesla
| Autopilot related deaths.
|
| https://www.tesladeaths.com/
|
| Current count is 33 for Autopilot related deaths.
|
| Last time I cross referenced incidents it was accurate, but that
| was a while ago.
| benrapscallion wrote:
| Are these numbers normalized for the number of cars and car-
| hours?
| dekhn wrote:
| No, they are not. https://archive.is/dTInm And the article
| leads with an anecdote but buries critical details about that
| specific accident (the driver had "rigged weights" to keep
| autopilot going even when his hands were off the wheel).
|
| I am not aware of any truly fair and impartial comparison of
| modern Teslas with other modern self-driving (whatever level)
| car technologies that have shown that Teslas are truly prone to
| more accidents. Fair and impartial would involve comparing
| rates, rather than absolute values (although that's just a
| starting point), correctly determining what model and what
| technologies were enabled, along with the driver's actions.
| Most newspapers are looking for clicks and "tesla autopilot
| crashes" get clicks, and the papers don't have time to do high
| quality investigative journalism.
|
| (i have no opinions on the matter; I don't own a tesla, don't
| know much about their technology beyond what I read in the
| press, and have limited real-life experience with "self-
| driving", basically just the standard lane-keeping and radar
| cruise control that's included with my car, which I don't use
| often, and have found is prone to all sorts of problems)
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Years before Tesla released AP Lexus had walled off ACC
| behind eye tracking.
|
| They weren't offering half the functionality AP claims and
| they realized the need to track driver attentiveness more
| robustly than looking for steering wheel torque.
|
| And even after incidents like this Tesla resisted for years
| before actually using their cameras for eye tracking
| gamblor956 wrote:
| It's even worse for Tesla if you normalize the data, because
| the rest of the industry also has advanced driving
| functionality with far fewer accidents or deaths.
|
| It turns out that one of the things that radar is good for is
| emergency braking regardless of lighting conditions.
|
| It also helps that other carmakers don't oversell the
| functionality of their advanced driving functionality; if
| anything they deliberately understate how well the systems work
| to avoid giving customers the false sense of safety that Tesla
| does.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Yeah I love this line of argument from the Tesla cult: "But
| wait people use their Tesla autonomous features more
| frequently [in conditions the system doesn't operate well
| in]."
|
| Like... yeah, that's called an unsafe system my dude.
| rschneid wrote:
| Safety of systems isn't binary, so what's the risk profile?
|
| Newer medical treatments have higher risk, just like
| experimental transportation methods carry greater risk.
|
| Everyone gets sick/injured and everyone needs to get
| around, so some suffering in the name of advancing these
| endeavors seems both inevitable and tolerable. The question
| is to what degree?
|
| Controlling access to and fallout from these automated
| driving systems is a temporary priority since the roads
| they're testing on are far more 'public' than an
| individual's body undergoing new medical treatment, but the
| long-term priority must be on getting the systems as safe
| or safer than other human drivers on aggregate. That will
| happen, sooner or later, and I'd rather see it sooner as
| long as the cost of the race isn't catastrophe. The only
| way to advance is to let it learn...
| ethanbond wrote:
| Yep, and when there is a dozen companies taking their
| obligations to the public extremely seriously, loading
| their cars with at least as many sensors as it takes to
| operate safely for the R&D phases, deploying in limited
| phases and not directly into the hands of the public, and
| not marketing their unproven tech as "Full Self Driving,"
| I think it's completely reasonable to single out the one
| company who's not doing any of that.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > even worse for Tesla if you normalize the data
|
| Where's the data that proves this? Tesla has ~2% of the auto
| market, but ~0.4% of deaths.
| sidibe wrote:
| ~2% of new cars isn't anywhere near 2% of cars on the road
| or miles driven, and newer cars are safer in general.
| dekhn wrote:
| miles driven, not market share, is the correct comparison
| here (and even then you'd want to include many other
| covariates, such as where the cars are operated,
| socioeconomic status of drivers, etc, etc) if you really
| want to compare different vehicles.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Most higher end vehicles (and frankly, I don't count Tesla
| as particularly high end, particularly not the Model 3)
| have similar stats, for a multitude of reasons (including
| but not limited to driver experience and time behind the
| wheel as a function of affordability of the vehicle).
| tomnipotent wrote:
| Where's your data to back up your claim?
| api wrote:
| Tesla's insistence that vision is all you need is one of the
| root issues.
|
| Humans are able to drive with vision alone in part because we
| have a high-level conceptual model of the world that we can
| rely on to fill in the gaps when a straight literal
| interpretation of vision is wrong or inadequate. We know, for
| example, that there are not likely to be walls under highway
| overpasses and that stop signs on billboards are not signs.
| This is a "strong AI" level problem that a car isn't going to
| be able to to solve, so instead the best answer is to give
| the car super-human senses to it doesn't need such a model as
| much.
|
| That and if we have self-driving cars we want them to be
| _safer_ than human drivers. That could only reasonably be
| achieved with super-human senses.
| watsocd wrote:
| No they are not. However they do mention that 40,000 people
| died in car incidents last year.
|
| But the 17 involving a Telsa is where we need to pay attention.
| LOL
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| How does this compare to Tesla's FSD? AutoPilot is just lane keep
| assist plus intelligent cruise control (like, cruise with
| distance assist according to the car in front of you), but most
| new cars these days have something comparable. FSD is usually
| what we are more likely to debate on HN.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Perhaps these Tesla APs have achieved sentience. Whether these
| are murders or suicides, idk.
| SmoothBrain12 wrote:
| [dead]
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| They cite an incident there where the driver didn't see the
| motorcyclist... if that's the case its hard to see how this case
| would be on Tesla
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Tesla claims it has 8 cameras, all around the vehicle,
| precisely so that it can handle cases like that.
|
| The fact that the car, despite having 8 cameras, all around the
| vehicle, _still failed to notice the motorcyclist_ is a damning
| indictment of the poor quality of Tesla 's vision software.
|
| My Subaru has absolutely no problem detecting cars, cyclists,
| or pedestrians around or behind my vehicle, and Subaru doesn't
| even have a best-in-class vision system.
| redox99 wrote:
| And Cruise with tens of cameras, lidars, radars, ultrasonics
| rear ended a bus[1].
|
| I'm not trying to bash Cruise. My point is that _shit
| happens_ , we should look at the complete statistics, not one
| offs.
|
| [1] https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/cruise-car-appears-
| to-re...
| watsocd wrote:
| ...fixed weights to the steering wheel
|
| I have to wonder what else the driver was doing. Perhaps sleeping
| or playing a game on their phone. I am glad they threw the book
| at this person and I am a Tesla fan.
|
| I don't own a Tesla yet but I will shortly. I now have a Subaru
| with EyeSight so I am accustomed to some extensive driver
| assistance. Especially on the highway but you still need to pay
| attention.
|
| I do a lot of business travel and have rented multiple Tecla's, a
| Chevy Bolt (no assist), and a Polestar (limited assist). The
| Tesla driver assist is outstanding but is still only assistance.
| It is not fully driving the car for you and you need to identify
| and pay close attention in more complex situations.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| What exactly are the main claims being made here? On a skim I
| don't think I saw anything to support the headline. I did see
| that they were suggesting the rate of crashes was rising quickly
| in the past year, which seems believable.
| kernal wrote:
| >The school bus was displaying its stop sign and flashing red
| warning lights, a police report said, when Tillman Mitchell, 17,
| stepped off one afternoon in March. Then a Tesla Model Y
| approached on North Carolina Highway 561.
|
| >The car - allegedly in Autopilot mode - never slowed down.
|
| >It struck Mitchell at 45 mph. The teenager was thrown into the
| windshield, flew into the air and landed face down in the road,
| according to his great-aunt, Dorothy Lynch. Mitchell's father
| heard the crash and rushed from his porch to find his son lying
| in the middle of the road.
|
| >"If it had been a smaller child," Lynch said, "the child would
| be dead."
|
| Elon should really stop the yearly Level 5 promises. Also, that
| driver should be charged with negligence.
| sowbug wrote:
| "Also, that driver should be charged with negligence."
|
| It's surprising this isn't the first (and maybe only) salient
| point. Autopilot is a slightly more capable cruise control. If
| a driver sets a car to drive 45 mph and then stops paying
| attention, who's at fault when the car hits something? The car
| was doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
|
| (As pointed out from another commenter, the article is about
| Autopilot, not FSD.)
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Elon should really stop the yearly Level 5 promises. Also,
| that driver should be charged with negligence.
|
| AutoPilot has little to do with FSD though. I'm assuming these
| are accidents related to autopilot rather than FSD, or the
| article would have been titled differently?
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(page generated 2023-06-11 23:02 UTC)