NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction • Hacker News Board

Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

#281

Post by hexane360 » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 7:24 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #189

It's interesting how vague this is. There's an NTSB investigation still pending into a specific Tesla crash.[1] The goals are different. NHTSA asks "do we need to do a recall?" NTSB asks "exactly what, in detail, happened here?" NTSB mostly does air crashes, but occasionally they do an auto crash with unusual properties. Here's the NTSB report for the Midland, TX crash between a train and a parade float.[2] That has…

Here's a reconstruction video they made to accompany the parade collision report: https://youtu.be/tMsjJWJFBbA

Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

#282

Post by DonHopkins » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 7:34 AM UTC

cmdrfred wrote: post #240

DonHopkins wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entice drivers to link to their social media accounts by offering features like automatically tweeting a photo of anyone you honk your horn at, and updating an online leader board of top speeds driven along every section of road.

>top speeds driven along every section of road If your goal is to make things safer I don't think this will help.

Yeah, when I worked for TomTom and suggested that idea, they weren't very enthusiastic about it.

And my other suggestion about a TomTomagotchi that you have to regularly drive around to different places to keep happy didn't go over very well, either. Maybe a petroleum company would be more receptive to that idea, though.

Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

#283

Post by em3rgent0rdr » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 7:36 AM UTC

I only want to use open-source code for something that my life depends on. That way it can be open to any one to inspect some can independently determine if the code is behaving as desired.

Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

#284

Post by bsbechtel » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 8:22 AM UTC

hedora wrote: post #262

blazespin wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that matters is "NHTSA notes that crash rates involving Tesla cars have dropped by almost 40 percent since the wide introduction of Autopilot" Even if autopilot was faulty in some way, if more people were living than dying - does it matter?

Yes. Otherwise, you'd hear about coal pollution all the time, but nuclear meltdowns wouldn't make the news (unless they became much more frequent). Similarly, 9/11 would be a footnote compared to sketchy pain killer drug trials. The black lives matter movement would focus more on sentencing disparities and for-profit prison conditions than police shootings, etc, etc. The reason it matters here is that it's presumably…

You are making comparisons between unrelated domains to make your point, which isn't really fair. Nonetheless, I think what you are really wanting to say is there is always room for improvement, and we should strive for that even if we've already made massive gains.

Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

#285

Post by dEnigma » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 8:38 AM UTC

feedjoelpie wrote: post #261

blazespin wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that matters is "NHTSA notes that crash rates involving Tesla cars have dropped by almost 40 percent since the wide introduction of Autopilot" Even if autopilot was faulty in some way, if more people were living than dying - does it matter?

This is a very simplistic way to look at it. We're in uncharted territory here. Did crash rates go down because driver error went down? Probably. So accidents for which the driver is liable go down a lot. And accidents for which the car-marker is liable go up a little. That last bit is still a very big deal.

Probably? Why do you think it likely that driver error would go down more than 40%?

Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

#286

Post by wibr » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 9:07 AM UTC

blazespin wrote: post #246

Animats wrote: post #189

It's interesting how vague this is. There's an NTSB investigation still pending into a specific Tesla crash.[1] The goals are different. NHTSA asks "do we need to do a recall?" NTSB asks "exactly what, in detail, happened here?" NTSB mostly does air crashes, but occasionally they do an auto crash with unusual properties. Here's the NTSB report for the Midland, TX crash between a train and a parade float.[2] That has…

The only thing that matters is "NHTSA notes that crash rates involving Tesla cars have dropped by almost 40 percent since the wide introduction of Autopilot" Even if autopilot was faulty in some way, if more people were living than dying - does it matter?

Yes it does, if it's faulty in some way it should be fixed in future versions and the results of the investigation should be public so that everyone in the industry can learn from that, just like in aviation.

Apart from that, more people living than dying could also imply that certain groups of people, maybe kids or bikers, could be at a higher risk of dying while the majority has a much lower risk, resulting in a net positive. So the acceptance of self-driving systems would also depend on the distribution of the risk.

Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

#287

Post by kalleboo » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 9:18 AM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #197

snewman wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, from previous reports it was already pretty clear that the driver was asleep at the wheel (literally or otherwise). The car is not supposed to allow this; it's supposed to check for hands-on-steering-wheel and other indicators of driver attention. It would have been nice to find out how that system broke down in this case.

It doesn't require continuous engagement. You can drive with hands off the wheel for several minutes at a time in many situations.

Didn't they make the check more aggressive after the latest accident? Or am I just mis-remembering speculation.

Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

#288

Post by gambiting » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 9:47 AM UTC

blazespin wrote: post #246

Animats wrote: post #189

It's interesting how vague this is. There's an NTSB investigation still pending into a specific Tesla crash.[1] The goals are different. NHTSA asks "do we need to do a recall?" NTSB asks "exactly what, in detail, happened here?" NTSB mostly does air crashes, but occasionally they do an auto crash with unusual properties. Here's the NTSB report for the Midland, TX crash between a train and a parade float.[2] That has…

The only thing that matters is "NHTSA notes that crash rates involving Tesla cars have dropped by almost 40 percent since the wide introduction of Autopilot" Even if autopilot was faulty in some way, if more people were living than dying - does it matter?

Well, yeah. Imagine there's heart surgery which has only 20% success rate. So every time 100 people go in for that surgery, only 20 survive.

Now, someone makes a robot that has 100% success rate, but every 100 operations, it has a glitch in the sofware, where it stabs and kills the patient instead. It has been calculated that on average, using the robot only kills 1-2 out of 100 people going in for surgery, compared to the old method of 80 people out of 100. The robot is clearly 80 times better than manual procedure, so why not keep using it?

The answer seems to be - because robot killing people is not an unavoidable outcome. It can be fixed. It's a software problem, a mistake that costs someone their lives. Similarily, an auto-driving Tesla may be killing less people on average than manual drivers, but that doesn't mean that any software problems that lead to it don't matter.

Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

#289

Post by gambiting » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 9:54 AM UTC

xorxornop wrote: post #273

mikeash wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't require continuous engagement. You can drive with hands off the wheel for several minutes at a time in many situations.

Besides, it's perfectly possible to fall asleep but with your hands still touching (even gripping!) the steering wheel.

That's also a solved problem - Mercedes cars have "attention assist" which can figure out how attentive you are by measuring how you drive. If you are literally falling asleep at the wheel, the system will get very annoying and insist that you stop for some rest.

Of course, whatever algorithm they are using won't work if the car is driving itself, you can't judge the reaction time if all the driver is doing is holding the wheel.

Re: NHTSA’s full investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot shows 40% crash rate reduction

#290

Post by gambiting » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 10:01 AM UTC

camiller wrote: post #78

ebbv wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I believe most people are really terrible drivers. That being said, there were 210 million drivers in the US in 2009. There's probably a lot more today. That's just 0.01% of drivers. That fact makes me have to question just how bad people really are, despite my own personal opinion. Or maybe cars are just really safe. A better statistic might be number of accidents. In 2015 2.44 million people were injured…

I had an econ professor assert that as cars got safer there were more accidents because people trusted the car to protect them more.... Logically, to reduce accidents due to carelessness we should put a 12" sharpened spike right in the middle of the steering wheel pointing at the drivers chest. If all accidents were deadly wouldn't drivers then exercise the utmost care?

There was a coach bus crash in the Alps a few years ago, and in the investigation they found out that one of the factors contributing to the crash was that the driver only had few years of experience, and only ever drove modern, top of the line buses. The problem with those is that they drive as easily as a small hatchback, despite being 20 meters long and weighing 17 tonnes. The engines are powerful, the transmissions are usually automatic, the brakes are strong - so you can easily forget that you are driving a 17-tonne fridge, and no matter how good your brakes are, you can't be braking continuously on a 15km long mountain descent, because the whole system will fail. The bus was equiped with engine and magnetic retarder for the drive, but like I said, on a modern bus that drives this easily, the driver just never had any need to use them. I think the report concluded that a driver with more experience in driving older vehicles, where you couldn't rely on assisted disc brakes, where all you had was a set of brake drums and just had to know how to use the 2 other braking systems, would have saved the bus.

Similarily, airplane pilots spend so much time in autopilot mode that they forget how to operate a plane in emergency situations.