I am not sure what happened in this situation, but I have to warn any HNers that have teslas or might get behind the wheel of one -- do not rely on the autopilot!!! If you are using the autopilot you must be in a heightened sense of alert, not lowered. The autopilot can get you into a dicey situation, and then you have to take over control and react very fast.
A Tragic Loss
261–270 of 511 posts
Re: A Tragic Loss
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is essentially AI kills driver. The truck was making a left turn in front of the Tesla, which was in the right lane of a 4 lane divided highway. The truck would have had to accelerate in the left turn lane, cross the divider, cross the left lane, then drive further so that the middle of the trailer was in the right lane. This takes at least 5-6 seconds for a semi, and if the semi were detected, there would have be…
Yeah i can't believe this is not bigger news. The Tesla AI was almost good enough to replace an attentive driver. But almost is not good enough.
> replace an attentive driver
It's unrealistic to assume that human drivers are attentive all the time. Autopilot never gets tired, never eats, never applies makeup, never sneezes, and never gets distracted by screaming children.
You have to compare autopilot to realistic humans, not your platonic ideal of what a driver should be. I'm sick and tired of people making statements about road transit predicated on the idea that real humans pay attention to the road with 100% fidelity at all times.
Re: A Tragic Loss
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Press Releases like this are for investors and media outlets, not for general consumers. Of course they are going to focus on damage control, because if they didn't focus on the safety features of autopilot and the hands-on requirement some media outlet would contort the situation and say "What safety features does this car to prevent an accident like this in the future? Is this technology actually ready to be used o…
I would not call a sentence in a manual a "requirement" A requirement would be when the autopilot didn't work unless one has at least one hand on the steering wheel. (Just like other manufactures do that) Tesla knows people are not going to use autopilot hands-on (especially after the novelty wears off)
That's exactly the requirement the Model S has. It starts beeping at you and gradually brings the vehicle to a stop if you take your hands off the wheel.
Re: A Tragic Loss
#264This is on the road to being off topic, but still relevant given some of the commentary in this thread: It makes me a bit sad that the political zeitgeist in the tech community is leaning towards "acceptable losses" when it comes to accidents in automated cars, to the point of pre-emptively expressing disdain at ordinary people reacting negatively to such news. I sense it's going to become harder and harder for us to…
Every life is special. Every life is sacred. Every life has rights and hopes and dreams and its own special contribution to humanity.
Yet, losses have to be weighed against the alternatives. Would you think it ethical to not put out seat belts, because they don't save lives in all cases? Or may even be harmful in some circumstances?
"Acceptable losses" is certainly a distasteful and dehumanizing perspective. Yet how else should we reason about seat belts? Or anything similar that is going to help save lives in the vast majority of cases, but may fail in some?
We don't always have the option of perfection. And is it really ethical to stand by as special, sacred lives end because we can't save every life, every time?
Re: A Tragic Loss
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel 'A Tragic Loss' sets the tone for the remaining highly technical overview, instead of the technical breakdown seeming tone-deaf, it added tone until getting to the concluding paragraph. Unfortunately, fortunately, Tesla is having to educate people and being very clear to not allow room for panic and unwarranted fear mongering. I would say it is as to the point as it can be, and that it is heartfelt.
In addition it had important information for how other Tesla drivers can use the auto-pilot feature more safely. The article combines condolences and helpful safety information to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. Also, you don't see GM making a blog post every time someone passes away in a car they make.
GM's cars don't have autopilot driving their passengers into a semi (that I know of)
Re: A Tragic Loss
#266I mean I understand Tesla has to make a statement here and I understand they want to ensure everyone that it's not really their fault but to title a post "A Tragic Loss" and then spend the majority of the post discussing all of your car's safety features and how it wasn't your fault just seems tone deaf and distasteful to me. Maybe they had to do it for legal reasons I don't know (I'm certainly not a lawyer) and I'd…
It's not just about Tesla though. They have to defend autopilot not only to protect the brand but to protect the public's perception of autonomous vehicles in general. Self driving tech is poised to save many many lives. So from a utilitarian perspective, it's probably justified to take extraordinary measures to make sure reactionary media and public whim doesn't kill it off, however uncomfortable that might seem in…
>> Self driving tech is poised to save many many lives.
Based on what?
Re: A Tragic Loss
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There are entire car models that have had zero driver deaths: http://www.freep.com/story/news/nation/2015/01/29/study-chan... The Tesla Model S will now never be one of them, and in fact, is now among average for fatality rates that includes motorcycles, drunks, and other dangerous factors. It's now not even among the class of luxury cars that have very low driver deaths. Right now self-driving cars are far too dange…
Wow, there's a lot of factors at play there I'm sure but the engineering teams behind those models should feel very proud indeed.
Re: A Tragic Loss
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Much like if you make a car that does 0-60mph in 3 seconds or does 200mph you encourage doing that. The fact that the autopilot is so good that it "almost" works as a driver is an issue for Tesla as we can see here. I realize autopilot has a nice ring to it, but it's not a chauffeur... Tesla sure has balls to pick the name "Autopilot" when it really should be called "CoPilot" and that would have saved a lot of troubl…
> The fact that the autopilot is so good that it "almost" works as a driver is an issue for Tesla as we can see here. If only someone could have foreseen these issues... http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/27/11518826/volvo-tesla-autop... http://www.thedrive.com/news/3753/former-google-exec-and-ai-... http://www.thedrive.com/tech/3909/volvo-rd-chief-teslas-auto...
The Drive article is an eerily prescient interview with Volvo's R&D chief and is only two weeks old:
Critics see a neither-nor limbo, with technology just
good enough to make drivers drop their guard, but not
good enough that driving off a cliff is an
impossibility. ... Shooting for but missing Level 3
autonomy would create his nightmare scenario: a car
that gets flummoxed by one of thousands of variables,
then asks a daydreaming co-pilot to wake up and save
the day.Re: A Tragic Loss
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then again, GM sells more vehicles in a week than Tesla has sold in its entire history.
This. Notice how quick they are to bring up "this is the first fatality in 130 million miles", but AFAICT, traffic fatalities in the US occur at a frequency of around 10 per billion miles [1], which is the same. So even though this is just one data point, it's spot on the current average for fatality frequency in normal cars. Furthermore, to gather enough statistics to be able to say with confidence "semi-autonomous…
The IIHS compares car model fatality rates: http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/driver-death-rates
If you want to do the numbers to compare the Tesla to other cars, where they measure driver fatalities per million registered years, do this:
130,000,000 miles / 12,000 average miles per year per car = 10,833 years.
That's 10,833 registered years for the Model S.
The IIHS site normalizes to deaths per million registered years, so multiply that number by 92.3, and since we have one death so far, the Tesla Model S is now at 92.3 driver deaths per million registered car years.
Let's compare to other car models:
Ford Taurus 2WD: 20 deaths
Hyundai AccentL: 86 deaths
Lexus LS 460 2WD: 18 deaths
Acura TL 2WD: 5 deaths
Audi A4 4WD: 0 deaths (yes, a bunch of car models had zero driver deaths)
And average for ALL 2011 vehicles: 28 deaths.
Re: A Tragic Loss
#270It's a blind spot. Dozens of cyclist get mowed down by right turning trucks every year in Germany alone and nobody cares about implementing a mandatory technological solution (beyond upgrading mirrors and optional camera systems) for that well defined space and situation at relative slow speeds, because costs to the logistic companies.
At least with the autonomous cars everybody still seems to care about eliminating more or less rare errors all together, because we seem less forgiving to technological than human error. And adding a fitting sensors and detection algorithms to eliminate that blind spot is relatively easy and cheap if the car has already a sensor network infrastructure.
I doubt that similar accidents with human drivers would even get their own statistical category.