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

361–370 of 530 posts

Re: Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

#361

Post by jessaustin »

pc86 wrote: post #349
vacri wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moral choice is the opposite direction: the car should prefer to kill the occupant than a bystander. The occupant is the reason why the car is in use; if it fails, the penalty for that failure should be on the occupant, not bystanders.

This is a great argument if your goal is no autonomous cars. Nobody buys a car that will choose to kill them.

Society will not tolerate a robocar that cheerfully kills our children to avoid some inconvenience to its occupants.

One might think that we're not talking about inconvenience, but we are, because after all any car may be driven slowly enough to avoid killing children in the road. A particular robocar that is not driven that slowly (which, frankly, would be all useful robocars), must avoid killing children in the road above all other priorities, including the lives of passengers. A VW-like situation in which this were discovered not to be the case, would involve far more dire consequences for the company (and, realistically, the young children and grandchildren of its executives) than VW faces for its pollution shenanigans.

Re: Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

#362

Post by chadlavi »

"It's a winding road going through a canyon, with no shoulder"

Doesn't sound like the recommended use case for autopilot? I thought you were only supposed to use it on a limited-access throughway?

Anyway, good to hear no one died this time, but both of these accidents do sound like there's a lot of user culpability involved. It seems like it would be reasonable on Tesla's end, since all Teslas know where they are, to limit autopilot to only roadways where it is reasonable to use it.

Re: Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

#363

Post by TetOn »

toomanythings4 wrote: post #355
Animats wrote: post #109

With three accidents on "autopilot" in a short period, the defects in Tesla's design are becoming clear. 1. Tesla's "hands on wheel" enforcement is much weaker than their competitors. BMW, Volvo, and Mercedes have similar systems, but after a few seconds of hands-off-wheel, the vehicle will start to slow. Tesla allows minutes of hands-off time; one customer reports driving 50 miles without touching the wheel. Tesla i…

>Tesla allows minutes of hands-off time; one customer reports driving 50 miles without touching the wheel. >They tried to blame the driver. In this incident, the driver was using autopilot in a fashion that it should not be; twisting road at high speed. The driver IS at fault. >They're being sued by the family of the dead driver This is no proof of anything. You can find a lawyer to sue anybody over anything. >and be…

>In this incident, the driver was using autopilot in a fashion that it should not be; twisting road at high speed. The driver IS at fault.

I disagree on this point. In any system that's supposed to be sophisticated enough to drive the car and but also carries a giant caveat like "except in these common driving situations..." failure is not instantly down to "user error." Such a system should gracefully refuse to take over if it's not running on an interstate or another "simple enough" situation; otherwise, as many have noted, the threshold for "is the driver paying sufficient attention" should be set much, much lower.

That the system is lulling the users into bad decisions is not automatically the fault of said user. Some blame, maybe most of the blame, has to fall on the autopilot implementation. When lives are on the line, design should err on the side of overly-restrictive, not "we trust the user will know when not to use this feature and if they are wrong it is their fault."

Re: Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

#364

Post by rayiner »

For folks apologizing for Tesla: people ignore instructions and prompts from their computers or gadgets. That's not driver fault: it's a part of the design problem that engineers have to deal with. As an engineer, you take the world as you find it.

I had a professor in college who specialized in airplane cockpit design. Her philosophy was that everything is a design failure. If the pilot pushes the wrong button, the design must be fixed to keep that from happening. It would seem to me that principle applies with even more force when we're talking about consumer products operated by random people rather than trained pilots.

Re: Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

#365

Post by return0 »

tmptmp wrote: post #357
return0 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The BMW, Volkswgen and the likes of dirty-gas-guzzlers-producers would be chuckling now. Why? Autonomous cars =/= electric cars

With Tesla in the picture, there is a lot of pressure on the BMW, Volkswagen etc to invest in the EV technology. So they would be chuckling now because with Tesla getting out of the competition (or with Tesla becoming weaker), they would have an easier task pushing their dirty-gas-guzzlers and of getting loads of easy profits . With Tesla out, they can even squash the entire electric car efforts altogether and will p…

> Tesla is better, Elon Musk is better

Perhaps you live in a bubble, as most car makers barely raise an eyebrow over tesla as a competitor so far. Making tonloads of batteries is not necessarily better than making efficient, safe and less polluting "gas guzzlers".

From the outside, it seems there is a push to revive the american car industry through EV, supported by lenient and eager to see results US regulators. Of course, time will tell, and in the process hopefully we will all have safer and eco-friendly cars.

Re: Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

#366

Post by verytrivial »

toomanythings4 wrote: post #355
Animats wrote: post #109

With three accidents on "autopilot" in a short period, the defects in Tesla's design are becoming clear. 1. Tesla's "hands on wheel" enforcement is much weaker than their competitors. BMW, Volvo, and Mercedes have similar systems, but after a few seconds of hands-off-wheel, the vehicle will start to slow. Tesla allows minutes of hands-off time; one customer reports driving 50 miles without touching the wheel. Tesla i…

>Tesla allows minutes of hands-off time; one customer reports driving 50 miles without touching the wheel. >They tried to blame the driver. In this incident, the driver was using autopilot in a fashion that it should not be; twisting road at high speed. The driver IS at fault. >They're being sued by the family of the dead driver This is no proof of anything. You can find a lawyer to sue anybody over anything. >and be…

> In this incident, the driver was using autopilot in a fashion that it should not be; twisting road at high speed.

I don't understand why, if the car's GPS co-ordinates are known, the car even allows autopilot on anything but roads known to be within spec.

> The driver IS at fault.

I'm not sure legal liability is that clear cut.

Re: Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

#367

Post by jessaustin »

Retric wrote: post #352
ssharp wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla's spin control is backfiring. They tried to blame the driver. They're being sued by the family of the dead driver, and being investigated by the NHTSA (the recall people), and the NTSB. In comparison, when a Google self-driving car bumped a bus at 2mph, Google admitted fault, took the blame, and Urmson gave a talk at SXSW showing the data from the sensors and discussing how the self-driving car misjudged the li…

Damages from a single death have a relatively low cap unless the victim was making a lot of money. Lost sales is generally a much larger issue.

Tesla drivers do tend to be higher earners than average.

Re: Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

#368

Post by eertami »

vacri wrote: post #254
esteth wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think such a value system is fine in as much as it preserves the safety of the driver. I'd like my car to make value judgements about what's safer - braking and colliding with an object or swerving to avoid it. I'd rather it brakes and collides with a child than swerve into oncoming traffic, but I'd rather it swerved into oncoming traffic to avoid a truck that would otherwise T-bone me. As long as the system only a…

The moral choice is the opposite direction: the car should prefer to kill the occupant than a bystander. The occupant is the reason why the car is in use; if it fails, the penalty for that failure should be on the occupant, not bystanders.

But in this case it isn't a bystander, it's out in the middle of the road in front of a moving vehicle.

If a child runs in front of my car then it is most definitely at fault and I'd honestly much rather it be dead than me, if those are the options.

Re: Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

#369

Post by JoeAltmaier »

eertami wrote: post #368
vacri wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moral choice is the opposite direction: the car should prefer to kill the occupant than a bystander. The occupant is the reason why the car is in use; if it fails, the penalty for that failure should be on the occupant, not bystanders.

But in this case it isn't a bystander, it's out in the middle of the road in front of a moving vehicle. If a child runs in front of my car then it is most definitely at fault and I'd honestly much rather it be dead than me, if those are the options.

You are not alone in that, but perhaps in a minority. A child cannot truly be 'at fault'.

Re: Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

#370

Post by [deleted] »

jessaustin wrote: post #319
esteth wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think such a value system is fine in as much as it preserves the safety of the driver. I'd like my car to make value judgements about what's safer - braking and colliding with an object or swerving to avoid it. I'd rather it brakes and collides with a child than swerve into oncoming traffic, but I'd rather it swerved into oncoming traffic to avoid a truck that would otherwise T-bone me. As long as the system only a…

I'd rather it brakes and collides with a child... Humanity: you're doing it wrong. That some humans have this attitude is another reason why humans shouldn't drive automobiles.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN