Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

ktvq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 530 posts

Re: Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

#221

Post by masklinn »

aangjie wrote: post #150
gaur wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tesla allows minutes of hands-off time; one customer reports driving 50 miles without touching the wheel. How are these numbers compatible with each other? Was the car going at >1000 miles per hour?

Meh.. I assumed it was a buggy case that allowed more than an hour of hands-off time.

Why would you need "more than an hour" to do 50 miles? Especially where you'd expect autopilot to be most used (highways)? 'round here it's about 40mn highway, and barely an hour (give or take) inter-city, and that's driving at posted speeds which people don't necessarily do (and I expect Tesla does not enforce)

Re: Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

#222

Post by studentrob »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #183
studentrob wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We "fire and forget" many type of systems with no possibility of human intervention--at least not in a timely manner Practically speaking, I agree with what you're saying. For autonomous systems as we think of them today, humans can set them and walk away. Philosophically, if I throw a ball into space, is its continued movement autonomous? Kicking off a computer program is just a complex ball. We don't have true ra…

> We don't have true randomness in computers. Yes we do.

Computers are deterministic. Maybe you can convince yourself that something in the outside world isn't, and generate numbers based off of that, like radioactive decay. Even that may be deterministic. I think it's a question for quantum-mechanics or philosophers.

Anyway, practically speaking, we tend to be happy with random numbers that other people would have a really difficult time copying.

Re: Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

#224

Post by easytiger »

wyldfire wrote: post #140
cperciva wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike crash is disturbing, because it's the case the "autopilot" is supposed to handle - divided limited-access highway under good conditions. The vehicle hit a guard rail on the side of the road. That may have been an system failure. Too soon to tell. This is the one I'm very interested to hear more about. From what I've heard, Tesla's self-driving is very aggressive in swerving to avoid obstacle…

> or in fact a legitimate reason to swerve? Reasoning about what's legitimate can be a really fine line. Oncoming car, raccoon, fawn, human, doe, coyote, elk: some of these obstacles might actually be net-safer to not swerve around [perhaps depending on speed]. I'd be really curious if any of the autopilots have a value system that tries to minimize damage/loss of life. And how does it value the exterior obstacle aga…

> obstacles might actually be net-safer to not swerve around

In the UK its illegal to swerve for these things. In the sense that if you subsequently cause an accident for swerving to avoid a cat, you are at fault.

Re: Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

#225

Post by azernik »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #215
michaelmcmillan wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the entire autopilot could be replaced with an over-the-air software update?

See the comments above, if the sensor suite is insufficient, over-the-air software updates won't help.

But OTA updates can disable the feature, which is the essential safety response right now. Even if they wanted to recall and add sensors, I don't think that would make this system safe enough - the bigger issue is the human factor involved in a not-quite-good-enough autonomous vehicle.

Re: Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

#226

Post by studentrob »

base698 wrote: post #124
alogray wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has this feature decreased safety? Tesla's first fatality came after 130 million autopilot miles whereas traditions in the US, we have one fatality every 90 million miles. If that continues to hold, this seems to be significantly safer with it's own set of caveats. Not altogether different than getting stuck in a burning car due to your seatbelt.

I actually worked out the math on this--Tesla is lying with statistics when they made this comment they did about 1 in 130 million miles. Here's what I did: 1 in 90 million rate: 1.1 x 10^8 Probability of No accident in one mile: 1 - 1.1 x 108 = ~9.9999999 x 10^8 Probability of No accident and driving 130 million miles: (9.99999999 x 10 ^ 8) ^ 130e6 = 0.24 Probability AT LEAST ONE ACCIDENT in 130 million miles = 1 -…

Another guy said on divided roads the rate is only about one per 150 million miles [1]

And, that still includes motorcycle accident rates which shouldn't be included in a comparison to Teslas.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/4sgxv1/while_te...

Re: Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

#227

Post by [deleted] »

easytiger wrote: post #224
wyldfire wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or in fact a legitimate reason to swerve? Reasoning about what's legitimate can be a really fine line. Oncoming car, raccoon, fawn, human, doe, coyote, elk: some of these obstacles might actually be net-safer to not swerve around [perhaps depending on speed]. I'd be really curious if any of the autopilots have a value system that tries to minimize damage/loss of life. And how does it value the exterior obstacle aga…

> obstacles might actually be net-safer to not swerve around In the UK its illegal to swerve for these things. In the sense that if you subsequently cause an accident for swerving to avoid a cat, you are at fault.

[deleted]

Re: Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

#228

Post by Dylan16807 »

greendestiny wrote: post #202
Dylan16807 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't we talking about a plane? And I said I trust a computer more , not that the presence of a computer is automatically enough. I'm not getting in a manually-controlled plane that's flying centimeters from a hard surface. I will get in some computer-controlled planes doing the same. (At the very least I want a real-time OS and dedicated range sensors. And the confidence of a plane owner who would lose millions of…

There are crop dusters that fly close to the ground and obstacles - do you want to get in a manual one or can I code up a computer controlled one and put you in it? What you really mean is you want to see safety data and a track record. As for the actual planes and auto-pilots, the real point is the kinds of engagements and disengagements that work in the air don't necessarily work on the ground and being so close to…

Close, but not constantly centimeters close. It's a whole different league, and not one I'm comfortable trusting a human with.

Re: Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

#229

Post by ghaff »

slavik81 wrote: post #182
iabacu wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's 90 million miles among all cars. I'd wager that if you compare it with cars at Tesla price point -- mostly luxury cars -- Tesla would look pretty bad.

Why do you think the accident rate is lower among luxury cars as compared to more common vehicles? I would suspect the opposite. My hypothesis is that the people who seek out and buy cars that go 0 to 60 in 3.2 seconds probably drive faster and more aggressively than average. They therefore are more likely to have an accident.

Luxury cars do tend to do pretty well among late model cars in terms of fatality rates--haven't seen rates for accidents overall. But the biggest correlation is probably that bigger cars are safer and smaller cars less so:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-lists-cars-with-highest-a...

The fatality rates are probably also notably better on late model cars relative to clunkers because of safety features.

Re: Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

#230

Post by Dylan16807 »

studentrob wrote: post #222
Dylan16807 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't have true randomness in computers. Yes we do.

Computers are deterministic. Maybe you can convince yourself that something in the outside world isn't, and generate numbers based off of that, like radioactive decay. Even that may be deterministic. I think it's a question for quantum-mechanics or philosophers. Anyway, practically speaking, we tend to be happy with random numbers that other people would have a really difficult time copying.

I suppose you could declare that true randomness doesn't exist, but that doesn't make computers special...

Anyway, most of the transistors in a chip are barely kept in a range where they're deterministic. Just push some out of that range, and you get randomness that's as true as anything else.

Post reply on HN