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Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

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Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#321

Post by CodeWriter23 »

Animats wrote: post #78

Tesla's system doesn't have enough sensors. Musk forced his engineers to try to do this almost entirely with vision processing, and that was a terrible decision. Vision processing isn't that good yet. Everybody else uses LIDAR. I've been saying for years that the right approach was to take the technology from Advanced Scientific Concepts' flash LIDAR and get the cost down. I first saw that demonstrated in 2004 on an…

This is an example of Tesla's RADAR sensor at work.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BE2lQK_0CDw

And Tesla's engineers aren't the first to bellyache about being asked to make the impossible a reality.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#322

Post by CodeWriter23 »

crocal wrote: post #81

The only industry to have produced truly driverless public transportation systems is the rail industry. Not aeronautics. Rail systems happens to be my business and what I read here makes me very worried. I don't think the majority understands what safety means in mass transportation. It's not about running miles and miles without accidents and basically saying "see"? It's about demonstrating /by design/ that the /com…

All due respect to your experience with the rail industry and its impressively high bar for safety, in the auto industry, if they can get the death rate down to 48 people killed every day in the US, that will be twice as safe as we are currently.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#323

Post by Tempest1981 »

aerlinger wrote: post #317
terravion wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That said, aviation accident rates have been falling asymptotically while this "troubling trend" has been going on. In the US we've had no fatalities on domestic commercial flights since like 2009, and only the two at SFO a couple of years ago on international flights to the US. This is on a couple of billion flights with hundreds of billions of passenger departures.

> This is on a couple of billion flights You sure about that number? Seems incredibly high to me.

"​Airlines are expected to operate 38.4 million flights in 2017, up 4.9%."

Maybe 3 billion passengers/year?

From http://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2016-12-08-01.aspx

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#324

Post by tlb »

archagon wrote: post #165
tlb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference: commercial pilots are highly trained, even-tempered, and take their job seriously. Most drivers are lazy, distracted, and apt to do something stupid in an emergency. It's very hard to make something safer than a commercial pilot. It's much easier to make something safer than a typical driver.

> Most drivers are lazy, distracted, and apt to do something stupid in an emergency. Er, citation needed. I think the vast majority of drivers are good drivers — otherwise, vehicular transport would be a disaster.

There are around 1.25M vehicle fatalities every year worldwide [0]. It is a disaster. Driving has killed more people than the world wars.

"Good drivers" -- we have no benchmark to measure against. Maybe it's amazing that 10x more people aren't killed, or maybe it's dismal that anyone is killed at all. When we have autonomous vehicles, we'll have a reference to compare against. I predict that "bad" will be the only word to describe the current situation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#325

Post by hvidgaard »

ghaff wrote: post #108
Animats wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requiring the driver to be awake and alert while not requiring them to actually do anything for long stretches of time is a recipe for disaster. Everybody who's looked at this seriously agrees. The aviation industry has looked hard at that issue for a long time. Watch "Children of the Magenta".[1] This is a chief pilot of American Airlines talking to pilots about automation dependency in 1997. Watch this if you have…

This is a well-researched area, in addition to being pretty obvious to everyone. Personally, I stopped using cruise control years ago. If I have to pay attention, I'm better off driving. This isn't just a matter for Tesla. The auto industry is rapidly heading for much better assistive driving systems. There's no way that the people heads-down in their cell phones are going to do this less once they realize they don't…

I've found that CC allow me to be more focused on the road, rather than looking at my speed every so often. My CC controls are on the wheel, so I can adjust it just by moving my finger, and I always keep a foot on the (accelerator) pedel ready to react as if I was maintaining speed with my foot. I know plenty of people that "rest" their foot while using CC, and that is just asking for an accident since the reaction time is longer.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#326

Post by hvidgaard »

titanomachy wrote: post #207
int_19h wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Subaru with lane-following and adaptive cruise. Lane follow fails miserably because it keeps losing the lane boundaries, even on clearly marked roads. But adaptive cruise control works extremely well, and particularly shines in stop-and-go traffic. One catch there is that it'll stop automatically, but it won't ever go if it came to a full stop - you need to tap the gas to reactivate cruise. If the car in fro…

I also drive a new-ish Subaru, adaptive cruise seems to work well in some situations (low speed stop-and-go, like you mentioned) but at high speeds it is terrifying... A speed that is reasonable on straight highways is pretty jarring around curves. If my foot is on the gas I'll subconsciously make the needed adjustment, but with cruise on I don't usually react in time. This could partly be a consequence of living in…

On most highways you can maintain speed through curves, but not in the mountains, and they do warn with plenty of signs. So CC is not a good fit for mountain driving.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#327

Post by csydas »

dantillberg wrote: post #226
ghaff wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a well-researched area, in addition to being pretty obvious to everyone. Personally, I stopped using cruise control years ago. If I have to pay attention, I'm better off driving. This isn't just a matter for Tesla. The auto industry is rapidly heading for much better assistive driving systems. There's no way that the people heads-down in their cell phones are going to do this less once they realize they don't…

There was a cruise control ish system I heard about on a car (a Mercedes, iirc) in Germany when I was a kid: instead of a target speed, you set a maximum speed, such that pressing normally down on the gas allowed the car to accelerate up to that speed. It trims down the excess gas to avoid exceeding the maximum speed. If you released the gas, the car would coast; and if you pushed the pedal down close to the floor (i…

> I've never liked the common cruise control in the US -- where you set a target and it applies the gas for you -- because I didn't like how removing my foot from the gas pedal moved my foot fractions of a second further from the brake in an emergency.

It's not even just that, it's worse at managing the use of the gas overall than a human with regards to cars as of 2015, it seems like the system is worse at managing the gas than humans are. I'm not a huge fan of cruise control as defined above because I find it makes me really inattentive (my problem, of course), but the benefit of not using the cruise control is that it seems like you get much better mileage. My family used to have to drive regularly between Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois for a few years, and I would always get better mileage not using cruise control than my brothers (who used cruise control) would. The difference would often be as much as half a tank of gas or more on older cars (2000-2010) and on relatively newer cars (2015) it'd still be a difference of a fair number of gallons.

I think the systems just aren't good at predicting when to coast and when to accelerate, and for very hilly regions, this means a lot of wasted gas.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#328

Post by sidlls »

aetherson wrote: post #200
delinka wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"neighborhood"? Who commutes across a neighborhood as the full extent of their commute? I suspect it's within a rounding error. Driving across a city, however, I definitely see this. Daily. And "accident" I expect to mean everything from a light tap rear-ending to a full fledged crash. People rear-end each other in my city every day. On my commute, I'll come across two a day. Wet days, a few more. The other five dire…

About six years ago, I would drive from San Mateo to Oakland at least twice a week, after work, to meet my then-girlfriend. So that's down 92, across the bridge, and up to Oakland. It's about 30 miles, all on freeway, and at that time of day all in heavy (though not all stop-and-go) traffic. I don't think I ever saw three separate rear-ends in a single drive. I can't say for certain that I ever saw two. I didn't driv…

I ride my bike in the Peninsula. I personally witness 2-4 accidents monthly ranging from fender-bender/taps to full-on smash-ups. Maybe 2-3 daily is an exaggeration, but they're plentiful. It's a rare day that goes by where the major freeways don't have slowdowns because of wrecks. I'd be surprised if the typical commuter on 101 saw less than 1 per day on average, actually.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#329

Post by maxcan »

jacquesm wrote: post #305
terravion wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That said, aviation accident rates have been falling asymptotically while this "troubling trend" has been going on. In the US we've had no fatalities on domestic commercial flights since like 2009, and only the two at SFO a couple of years ago on international flights to the US. This is on a couple of billion flights with hundreds of billions of passenger departures.

Airliner pilot discipline is orders of magnitude better than your average driver.

I'm a private pilot (general aviation, single engine cessna's). For the most part, our discipline is orders of magnitude higher than all but the best drivers. Airline pilots are orders of magnitude better than us. You are absolutely correct.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#330

Post by maxcan »

Animats wrote: post #90
empath75 wrote: post #8

The level-2 driving that Tesla is pushing seems like a worst case scenario to me. Requiring the driver to be awake and alert while not requiring them to actually do anything for long stretches of time is a recipe for disaster. Neither the driver nor the car manufacturer will have clear responsibility when there is an accident. The driver will blame the system for failing and the manufacturer will blame the driver for…

Requiring the driver to be awake and alert while not requiring them to actually do anything for long stretches of time is a recipe for disaster. Everybody who's looked at this seriously agrees. The aviation industry has looked hard at that issue for a long time. Watch "Children of the Magenta".[1] This is a chief pilot of American Airlines talking to pilots about automation dependency in 1997. Watch this if you have…

This is the same "aviation industry" which, domestically, has had a perfect safety record since around 2009? Not near perfect, not 99%, but literally zero fatalities?

Also, as a pilot, I can tell you that the Tesla Autopilot functions very much like what we have in planes. It steers the vehicle and significantly decreases workload while increasing overall safety but needs to be constantly monitored and can easily be misconfigured or operate in unexpected ways.

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