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A Tragic Loss

teslamotors.com

81–90 of 511 posts

Re: A Tragic Loss

#81
> It is important to note that Autopilot is...still in a public beta phase...

No, it's not important to note that. You should not be able to hide behind the word "Beta" for systems that could kill people. Either you're willing to let people risk their lives on your software or you're not, and you were.

Re: A Tragic Loss

#82
post #45

Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, I'm intrigued that the color is relevant in the car's case - wouldn't it be using some sort of radar to detect and map objects rather than vision? I appreciate I am probably missing something.

Tesla's Autopilot uses a radar unit, a front-facing camera, and twelve ultrasonic sensors on the front and back bumper. The ultrasonic sensors are short range and are for detecting adjacent cars and obstacles while parking, the camera is used for detecting lanes, and the camera and radar work together to detect cars. The radar is low to the ground and probably doesn't pick up a trailer that's high off the ground. The…

Would an infrared camera have picked up the trailer?

Re: A Tragic Loss

#83
post #30

> What we know is that the vehicle was on a divided highway with Autopilot engaged when a tractor trailer drove across the highway perpendicular to the Model S. Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied. Tragic no doubt, but I'm relieved that this was not a "Autopilot did something very very wrong" story. Autopilot has the p…

This seems like a pretty big oversight, large object that car is too tall to clear safely seems like it could cause a lot of problems. Would the car try to make a lane change while next to a trailer?

Tesla's Autopilot only changes lanes when commanded to by the driver. This is done by putting the turn signal on. If you put the turn signal on while next to a trailer that doesn't have stuff coming down near the ground, then yes, the car will likely change lanes right into it. But it's easy to avoid: just look before you signal.

Re: A Tragic Loss

#84
> The high ride height of the trailer

Is non-standard ride-height a safety failure? Should trailers have crash panels to avoid drive-unders?

Re: A Tragic Loss

#85
post #19
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't sound like what happened. "The driver didn't notice" well, that's why they're using autopilot. No matter how many messages people throw at users, any autopilot that doesn't detect that the driver is awake and operating the vehicle is going to be used by sleeping or otherwise unattentive drivers. It's just human nature. So what likely happened was the driver was screwing around and the autopilot completel…

From the information given, we don't know if the truck pulled out right in front of the car giving the driver no time to react, or if the truck pulled out a minute beforehand and the driver was just oblivious. In the absence of any information either way, it's nasty to just assume the driver was inattentive.

I don't think it's nasty, I think it's realistic. I also think that it aligns with the research that shows humans take a significant amount of time to adjust to taking back over control from autopilot. This is one of the primary design considerations behind the Google self driving car having absolutely no steering wheel or brake. The illusion of humans being able to be the fallback when they're not physically capable of it is a dangerous situation.

Re: A Tragic Loss

#86
post #8

Tesla should not allow autopilots. They have nothing to gain by the negative publicity they will get from cases like these. Regardless of how bad luck the driver had, tesla can always be blamed for relaxing the driver's reflexes by giving a false sense of safety. It doesnt matter if it was by default turned off or hidden in menus. What other companies use this kind of driving assist system? The ones i know are only h…

>Tesla should not allow autopilots. They have nothing to gain by the negative publicity they will get from cases like these.

This is literally the only way to develop such systems. And regardless of incidents like this, these systems will be developed sometime in the fairly near future and whichever company is on the leading edge of them will command a massive new market that will probably start growing incredibly rapidly right after it takes off.

Re: A Tragic Loss

#87

Tragic. Good that they own it, though I'm not thrilled with this: It is important to note that Tesla disables Autopilot by default and requires explicit acknowledgement that the system is new technology and still in a public beta phase before it can be enabled. When drivers activate Autopilot, the acknowledgment box explains, among other things, that Autopilot “is an assist feature that requires you to keep your hand…

This statement is also disengenuous: This is the first known fatality in just over 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated. Among all vehicles in the US, there is a fatality every 94 million miles. Worldwide, there is a fatality approximately every 60 million miles. The wording implies that these numbers are directly comparable, but they are not. I would guess that Autopilot is much more likely to be activate…

Yes, and since Tesla explicit ask driver to take over in dangerous situation, the number (fatality/miles) is certainly higher. Still, impressive result by the autopilot. I'm wondering, is there any advanced driving simulation? I'm guessing since they have now lots of data, they could simulate dangerous/extreme situation.

Re: A Tragic Loss

#88
Very sad. I once designed a robot that used infra-red collision detection to avoid obstacles, my home built, and painted flat black, stereo cabinet registered as open space and the robot drove right into it at full speed. It was a quick lesson on sensor fallibility for me.

I've also observed human pilots on busy roads nearly colliding with obstacles when driving toward the setting sun, the visor pulled down and still trying to shade their eyes.

But robots aren't humans, and they don't have to rely only on vision, there are so many ways to "look" it seems like we should have several different ways of identifying obstacles. Different spectra at least.

Re: A Tragic Loss

#89

Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, I'm intrigued that the color is relevant in the car's case - wouldn't it be using some sort of radar to detect and map objects rather than vision? I appreciate I am probably missing something.

Autopilot uses a forward facing camera & radar. It sounds like the truck came in at a perpendicular angle. It may have been in the cone of sight for the camera but not the radar depending on how those are setup. The 360 degree sensors on the Tesla are for parking only ( Personally when I worked on a self driving car we were going with 360 degree camera and doing path planning based on that, but Tesla has opted not to…

Doesn't a 360 degree camera require it to be placed on top of the car?

Re: A Tragic Loss

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I'm starting to get really weirded out by Tesla's immediate "not our fault!" blog posts every time a Tesla is involved in any kind of accident. I could see the necessity the first few times back when it was new technology to a lot of people (and Top Gear had it in for them), but with it happening over and over it seems whiny and a bit callous. How long to they plan to keep doing this?

> How long to they plan to keep doing this? So long as every Tesla accident makes the homepage of CNBC, unlike the millions that occur in other makers' vehicles. Tesla puts out an immediate PR, and the breaking news that went up on all the financial sites included quotes from it nearly as fast. http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/30/us-regulators-investigating-t...

Yeah no kidding, thousands of people die every year in Fords and no one gives a shit, 1 guy dies in a Tesla and "these cars are unsafe, run for your lives, hide yo kids and yo wife, sell your stock, return your car!". I fucking hate modern media.
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