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

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

#291

Post by dagw »

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?

10 accidents where everybody walks away is much better than 1 accident where someone dies.

20 years ago they redid the traffic pattern where I used to live to something many people found really confusing and many people claimed felt dangerous. A study 2 years later found that, while it was true that accidents on that part of the road had increased, the number of injuries due to accidents had plummeted. A follow up study a few years later found that accidents had dropped back to around their original level and serious injuries where still basically at zero.

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

#292

Post by furyg3 »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #120
mikeash wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't require instant attention, no. But it's hard envision a scenario where the car needs attention at some point in the future, not particularly soon, but can't drive itself. Maybe I'm drawing the line at the wrong point, though. If a car can drive itself but may occasionally need to pull over and ask the driver to tell it which way to go, at the driver's leisure, is that level 3 or level 4? I thought 4, but I…

Let's say that the car is entering a fog or other weather condition, which it realizes is beginning to obstruct its visibility or control (e.g. snow, heavy rain, wind). After visibility or control impairment has crossed a warning threshold, but before putting safety at risk, the car can alert the driver and begin the process of handing over manual control.

I think the idea is that at Level 4, the car can drive the way humans drive. If it's unsafe for the car to drive autonomously, it's unsafe for humans, too.

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

#293

Post by furyg3 »

NamTaf wrote: post #233
randomstring wrote: post #86

Waiting for the headline: "Human Fails to Prevent Accident, Outraged Public Calls for Banning of all Human Drivers" The obsession with perfection in self-driving cars is misplaced, they just need to be demonstrably better than humans. This is obviously the future.

At the very least in a legal standpoint that's not true, because with a human driver it's far easier to define fault (which in turn allows for the issue to be resolved) than if two autopilots happen to collide. Who pays for what then? From a safety point of view, I'm more inclined to agree however I'm not entirely convinced that we've passed the novelty stage of it yet where drivers will remain vigilant because it's…

There's all sorts of cases in real life now when defining fault is not at all easy. Children and animals are two examples of 'autonomous' individuals who's liability may lie with another party (parent/owner), buy also may not, depending on the circumstances.

Additionally, who's at 'fault' really doesn't matter when in most cases the damages are fully outsourced to insurance providers. In the case of autonomous driving, this insurance burden is shifted up a level to the automaker, but this cost will be passed on to the car's owner in some way, either in the cost of the car or a subscription to autonomous driving.

However if autonomous driving is safer than non-autonomous driving, premiums will go down, probably dramatically. Insurance companies can much more easily monitor the quality of autonomous driving for various automakers / cars either by the testing specification that they meet or the real-world statistics. Are autonomous Tesla's in less accidents than autonomous Volvo's? Cheaper premiums for Tesla.

This is exactly the situation you want to be in. Premiums for individuals are blunt instrument... it's hard to change many individuals behavior, the rewards may be low for the individual (save $3 on your premium!), and the penalties can be pretty random (you sped that one time so you're a high risk driver... or are there just more police in your city?). It's way better to incentivize at a higher level, like the automaker.

The only case where automakers would truly be at risk is something they should control, and that is if they pulled a VW and committed fraud on their autonomous driving tests, or were negligent in overlooking scenarios or providing updates.

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

#294

Post by cmdrfred »

DonHopkins wrote: post #282
cmdrfred wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

The tomagotchi idea is sort of like Waze. You get littlrle "candies" the more you drive. That one worked out for them.

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

#295

Post by kalleboo »

stale2002 wrote: post #114
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except there are "autopilot" miles in the before bucket. They are comparing before and after Autosteer so Autosteer is in the after bucket only. TACC however is in both buckets, aka this is supposed to be a comparison showing the increase in safety when going from level1 to level2 systems but both buckets have tons of human driven miles mixed in.

Level 1 = cruise control. All cars in the entire world are level 1 autonomous these days.

You'd be surprised how many cars are still sold without cruise control.

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

#296

Post by inimino »

dkonofalski wrote: post #176
jay-anderson wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's okay to withhold judgement and to be skeptical until seeing actual data. Especially for rapidly developing technologies like self-driving cars.

I didn't say it wasn't ok to be skeptical, just that I wasn't surprised by the results. Teslas have been on the road for over a year with AutoPilot and there haven't been any accidents caused by the system. Why anyone is surprised that AutoPilot is safer than a human driver is what I'm not understanding. Based on the votes, though, apparently computers are evil and shouldn't be trusted and we should all be amazed whe…

You said you didn't understand why it was surprising, which is a different thing than not being surprised.

Computers are good at lots of things like playing chess, and still completely incapable at lots of things that involve common sense. Expecting autonomous cars to be better than human drivers eventually is one thing, but it is certainly not obvious that we are there yet.

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

#297

Post by inimino »

dkonofalski wrote: post #178
krschultz wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The history of self driving cars shows that it is not an easy task. We've been working on this for over 15 years. I was on a self driving car team during 2008-2010. We won multiple intercollegiate competitions. At that time I was certain it would be 20+ years before we had something that could drive on the roads. The progress has been spectacular.

No, programming the self-driving car is not an easy task. A car that's already been programmed, though, is definitely going to be safer than a human driver and driving for the computer is an easy task.

> definitely going to be safer than a human driver

That's just ridiculous. It is going to be safer in some cases and less safe in others, and obviously it depends on the system and the driving conditions. To say that a computer is necessarily a better driver is just science fiction until we have solid data showing that to be the case.

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

#298

Post by babyrainbow »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #98
sandworm101 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dream remains a dream. Being able to call your car like batman did the batmobile, a car able to navigate unsupervised is still a decade, perhaps decades, away.

Oh jeez. So what if it's 10 years away? Even if it's 20 years away it's a piss drop in terms of time. Do you remember what the Internet was like in 1994? I do. It was shit. There wasn't even Google. Forget about looking things up on your mobile, there wasn't even mobile, nevermind Internet on mobile. It's barely 20 years and the world has _completely_ changed because of it. Self-driving cars are barely at the 1994 In…

>It's going to happen.

You cannot compare every arbitrary thing to how internet has progress and just win the argument. That is just wishful thinking.

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

#299

Post by theluketaylor »

uncoder0 wrote: post #211

After looking at the report it looks like Tesla ran into the same issue we did in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. The trailer was higher than the front facing sensors. We and most other teams had all assumed 'Ground Based Obstacles' meant that any obstacles on the test track would make contact with the ground in the lane of travel. DARPA decided to put a railroad bar across the street and expected cars to back up and…

Making sure mistakes only happen once is why I think all companies working on self driving cars should have to supply their sensor data for a fixed time before any collision or successful crash avoidance publicly. The changes they make to their code remain their own trade secret, but building up an extensive library of test cases means everyone's software will get safer faster.

So far NHTSA has encouraged such data sharing but they haven't outright mandated it.

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

#300

Post by loup-vaillant »

bsbechtel wrote: post #284
hedora wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Simply put, saving lives should not stop one from saving even more lives, if possible.
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