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Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

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Re: Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

#101

Post by ivanech »

marcell wrote: post #80

Highway driving is supposed to be "easiest" problem for self driving cars to solve, since there are fewer edge cases, less turning, etc., but it's also the most dangerous type of driving. You are much more likely to die going at 65mph than 25mph. I think deploying self driving cars at <=25mph speeds at first would be wise. Personally, I wouldn't risk letting a car take over at high speeds until there is a longer trac…

Many places with <=25mph speeds have pedestrians, and they're a lot more delicate than vehicles are. Drivers aren't the only ones at risk.

Re: Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

#103

Post by ploxiln »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #73
Someone1234 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something that will also be great will be a sort of "crash dump/bug report" button for these cars. Good point, and it isn't just vehicles with auto-pilot perhaps all vehicles. The 2017 and 2018 Chrysler Pacifica Minivan kept on randomly shutting off[0] and loosing all electrical power at freeway speeds. You had to put the vehicle back into park, on the freeway, to restart it. There are several stories of near death…

Various sources put the current SLOC count in modern vehicles in the hundred-million range: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/39559/does-the-... A lot of that is for the infotainment systems, but regardless, we're probably going to be seeing automakers struggle more and more with all of the problems that have plagued the software industry for its entire history. On the one hand, I want to say that situatio…

I think this is a key point. SLOC is going way up.

It's sort of natural - it's "why not". We can afford to have more SLOC than ever before. Why bother to try to reduce it, that's not a priority, our priorities are features and fixes. It becomes too much to really understand and manage, and then it's all automated checks and automated tests.

It's very hard to get the average/common developer to spend time thinking about how we can remove stuff, clean stuff up. And managers don't want to pay them to do that. In some places it eventually becomes a big problem, and then it's time for a big rewrite. Most software is throw-away. Website front-ends, mobile device drivers, etc ... mostly thrown-away roughly every year. It's the relatively rare and stodgy classic open-source stuff that's re-used (with minor updates) for decades. OK, I'm getting off-topic ...

Re: Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

#104

Post by ineedasername »

antirez wrote: post #61

"Our data shows that Tesla owners have driven this same stretch of highway with Autopilot engaged roughly 85,000 times since Autopilot was first rolled out in 2015. ... There are over 200 successful Autopilot trips per day on this exact stretch of road." Who wrote this statement does not understand software. If there is some kind of Heisenbug, those numbers are too small to prove that the software is ok, and actually…

It also means they don't have significant representation of all driving conditions on the stretch, placement of sun, overcast, lighting conditions at night, traffic, weather, etc. I can imagine at least a dozen very distinct conditions, and many more subtle variations. 85k isn't very large to get good coverage of all conditions and generalize from them.

Re: Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

#105

Post by MBCook »

JohnTClark wrote: post #34
MBCook wrote: post #2

If he had seen this issue multiple times before why would he keep using autopilot in that area? That seems like a very odd decision.

Maybe Tesla told him that the issue was fixed and he can use it again. Why do people trust auto pilot at such high speeds? It is still new technology. Let the autopilot park your car, if it makes a mistake the only bad thing that can happen is just a few scratches and in 5-10 years use autopilot on low traffic streets and then go to the highway. You can't expect new technology to be safe.

If it’s not safe you shouldn’t be selling it.

Re: Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

#106

Post by zamalek »

My opinion: EVs, self-driving or directed, need an ejection mechanism for their batteries. Petrol has the advantage that it may ignite, where batteries are almost guaranteed to when damaged. Ideally, it would be an active system (launching the batteries no more than a meter away) - but that could fail under the conditions which caused the damage to the batteries. An alternative would be a passive system made of materials known to melt when exposed to a lithium fire - providing a few centimeters of separation from the cabin. Either way, the current situation is not ideal.

Re: Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

#107

Post by icefo »

lopmotr wrote: post #55
MBCook wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly worried about that when writing the comment. The car should have avoided it (based on Tesla’s usual claims). But Tesla and everyone else says the owner is still ultimately responsible because AutoPilot isn’t a 100% situation. If my car did something funky like randomly accelerate or turn hard at a given intersection and the manufacturer refused to fix it I’d stop driving through there. Why push your luck?…

We adapt to weird behavior all the time. I once found my brake pedal went right to the floor while driving. Then it fixed itself. I drove carefully after that but still kept using it. The other day my engine started revving up uncontrollably until I pulled over and turned it off. It's been fine since. I still drive it. Would you blame someone if their check engine light was on or the steering felt a bit wobbly?

Pedal that went to the floor and then fixed itself probably mean you lost a brake pad and now you're using the Piston/caliper to stop (it should make grinding noise and your rotor / Piston / caliper won't last long)

I'd get this fixed, if I'm right you're going to lose half the braking power of your car soon. (Pretty much all cars have a dual braking system, if shit happens you lose one front and one rear brake but not everything)

Re: Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

#108

Post by ineedasername »

dirtae wrote: post #93
antirez wrote: post #61

"Our data shows that Tesla owners have driven this same stretch of highway with Autopilot engaged roughly 85,000 times since Autopilot was first rolled out in 2015. ... There are over 200 successful Autopilot trips per day on this exact stretch of road." Who wrote this statement does not understand software. If there is some kind of Heisenbug, those numbers are too small to prove that the software is ok, and actually…

I believe the accident happened on US 101, which is a multi-lane highway with 5 or 6 lanes at the spot where the accident occurred. How many of the trips Tesla is citing occurred with the vehicle in the same lane as this guy? Comparing apples to apples would probably greatly reduce these 85,000 / 200 per day figures.

Exactly. Same lane, same time of day, same time of year (sunset/sunrise changes in lighting conditions) same weather patterns, same level of traffic. The combinatorics involved expand the possibilities to the point that some scenariors may have had little or no coverage from a dataset with 85k observations.

Re: Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

#109

Post by tytytytytytytyt »

smartician wrote: post #97
shawn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heisenbugs in AI are also interesting. As computers approach sentience, it will become progressively harder to explain their behavior. Why did you eat a bagel instead of eggs this morning? Usually there isn't a scientific answer. In the present, AI models are already so complicated that it seems hard to get reproducible diagnostic results, short of just saving every frame of data that the car's sensors pick up. And f…

Aren't many AI methods also inherently probabilistic? That would make it by definition impossible to definitively explain any particular behavior.

I don't think that means it's impossible. You can still log all inputs and sources of entropy.

Re: Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

#110

Post by ppseafield »

mohaine wrote: post #40
herbst wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was so excited about auto-pilot and dreamed of getting in my car and sleeping while it made cross-country trips. So much for that, that seems way far out. This is more a hijack than a direct critique but I think the general issue is the assumption that we need a private vehicle for that. Trains are perfectly capable for bringing me from A to B while I am sleeping for years now. Edit:// with years I mean years. Be…

In the US you will have lots of time to sleep due to waiting for an oncoming train to clear. In most parts of the country we don't have dedicated passenger tracks. Amtrak (our passenger line) just rents track time on the freight lines. The problem is that freight lines are often single track lines so if there is oncoming freight you just wait until the freight clears. Sometimes this his hours. Until we have dedicated…

My last Amtrak ride was my very last for this reason. My train was delayed four and a half hours!
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