An Update on Last Week’s Accident • Hacker News Board

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#191

Post by kristianc » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 9:51 AM UTC

pja wrote: post #184

kristianc wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Quite. Tesla is deliberately comparing their modern vehicle design & wealthy driver base (statistically one of the safest cohorts) with the entirety of the U.S. driving population. This is bad statistics: We expect Tesla vehicles to have far fewer accidents than the mean US vehicle per mile, because Tesla's are expensive modern vehicles with (relatively) wealthy drivers who can afford to keep them maintained & will…

Firstly, wealthy drivers can afford to keep their cars in better shape and can afford better cars in the first place. Neither of these factors depend on self-driving technology. Secondly, Tesla themselves makes it clear that their self-driving can't be relied upon to driver the car unsupervised - the driver has to be paying attention at all times in case the Tesla self-driving code decides to do something catastrophi…

What I'm looking for really is anything specific to auto-pilot technology to suggest that the safety benefits won't also be met, or exceeded, when extrapolated across the whole population.

All other factors taken into account, driving has become much, much safer in recent years, and is now safer than it ever was. When you start to use technology to eliminate driver errors in that self-same error-prone cohort, there's no reason to think that the safety dividend won't be even more pronounced than it is today.

If you want to link crash rates to wealth, you would also have to account for countries like Germany, that has a similar median wealth figure to the US, but a vastly lower motorway death rate [1]

It seems you can't both say 1) Tesla drivers are less likely to have accidents because they are wealthy and error-prone, and 2) Extending self-driving technology that eliminates basic errors to less-wealthy and/or more error-prone drivers won't have a net benefit on driver safety.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584401...

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#192

Post by biktor_gj » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 9:54 AM UTC

I don't care about Tesla at all, not a fan boy or anything, but I don't understand all the blaming on Tesla for this accident. So, the guy had complained 'between 7 and 10 times' about Autopilot malfunctioning there, yet he kept on using it Autopilot disengaged before the crash, giving visual and audible alerts before turning off, yet he didn't take the wheel, so he probably was doing something else instead of keeping attention in a zone where he said the thing failed... How many times do they have to say that even if you're using AP you need to stay focused on the road? I'm sorry for the guy, but if you don't trust a system that's as critical as this you either don't use it or you're very cautious when using it.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#193

Post by martin_bech » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 9:54 AM UTC

fcantournet wrote: post #181

kristianc wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Quite. Tesla is deliberately comparing their modern vehicle design & wealthy driver base (statistically one of the safest cohorts) with the entirety of the U.S. driving population. This is bad statistics: We expect Tesla vehicles to have far fewer accidents than the mean US vehicle per mile, because Tesla's are expensive modern vehicles with (relatively) wealthy drivers who can afford to keep them maintained & will…

Statistically if you're wealthy enough to own a Tesla, you're also way less likely to have to drive when tired/under the influence for example. All sorts of constraints are correlated with wealth that put you in way more risky situations if you're poorer.

Bullshit or post a source.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#194

Post by sweden » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 9:55 AM UTC

bufferoverflow wrote: post #182

sweden wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's widely known that RADAR systems are not able to detect stationary objects, only moving ones. Actually, they are are to detect them but just not where they come from, so a barrier in the middle of the road and a traffic sign on the side of the street, they would look like the same to the RADAR system. But to be honest, I am more worried with the markings of the road rather than the inability of the autopilot of n…

> It's widely known that RADAR systems are not able to detect stationary objects, only moving ones. Actually, they are are to detect them but just not where they come from That doesn't make any sense. Radar systems do detect stationary objects just fine. In fact, from the point of view of the moving car, almost nothing is stationary. I wouldn't be surprised if you're correct about the markings on the road, I almost c…

It is mentioned in the manual of the car:

"Traffic-Aware Cruise Control cannot detect all objects and may not brake/decelerate for stationary vehicles, especially in situations when you are driving over 50 mph (80 km/h) and a vehicle you are following moves out of your driving path and a stationary vehicle or object is in front of you instead."

You can also read here that Volvo's system faces the same problem: https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#195

Post by sweden » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 9:55 AM UTC

fake-name wrote: post #183

sweden wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's widely known that RADAR systems are not able to detect stationary objects, only moving ones. Actually, they are are to detect them but just not where they come from, so a barrier in the middle of the road and a traffic sign on the side of the street, they would look like the same to the RADAR system. But to be honest, I am more worried with the markings of the road rather than the inability of the autopilot of n…

> It's widely known that RADAR systems are not able to detect stationary objects, only moving ones. Uh, what? I think you're thinking of Doppler radar systems. You can do static scene imaging with radar, no problems (I've written the code to do it, even!). There's no way in hell a car is going to be using a Doppler radar. In all likelyhood, they're using a plain-old FMCW system, and it can absolutely detect stationar…

Answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16722617

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#196

Post by IkmoIkmo » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 10:00 AM UTC

I hate how Tesla framed this as a statistics game.

It's like an amazing heart doctor one day suddenly stabbing his patient in the heart with a scalpel, killing him, and then saying... well, sometimes I malfunction, but by and large I cure patients 10x more often than my colleagues.

That isn't okay and it's important to talk about that strange behaviour to fix it.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#197

Post by Pica_soO » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 10:04 AM UTC

kristianc wrote: post #180

pja wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And no, you can't get out of culpability by claiming statistical superiority. Quite. Tesla is deliberately comparing their modern vehicle design & wealthy driver base (statistically one of the safest cohorts) with the entirety of the U.S. driving population. This is bad statistics: We expect Tesla vehicles to have far fewer accidents than the mean US vehicle per mile, because Tesla's are expensive modern vehicles wit…

> Quite. Tesla is deliberately comparing their modern vehicle design & wealthy driver base (statistically one of the safest cohorts) with the entirety of the U.S. driving population. This is bad statistics: We expect Tesla vehicles to have far fewer accidents than the mean US vehicle per mile, because Tesla's are expensive modern vehicles with (relatively) wealthy drivers who can afford to keep them maintained & will…

Wealth of driver - converts to potential good lawyers per damage per crash converts to fear of god in Tesla software departments management converts to actual safety practices being followed and corners not being cut?

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#198

Post by chris_t » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 10:07 AM UTC

pja wrote: post #184

kristianc wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Quite. Tesla is deliberately comparing their modern vehicle design & wealthy driver base (statistically one of the safest cohorts) with the entirety of the U.S. driving population. This is bad statistics: We expect Tesla vehicles to have far fewer accidents than the mean US vehicle per mile, because Tesla's are expensive modern vehicles with (relatively) wealthy drivers who can afford to keep them maintained & will…

Firstly, wealthy drivers can afford to keep their cars in better shape and can afford better cars in the first place. Neither of these factors depend on self-driving technology. Secondly, Tesla themselves makes it clear that their self-driving can't be relied upon to driver the car unsupervised - the driver has to be paying attention at all times in case the Tesla self-driving code decides to do something catastrophi…

>Wealth correlates with health correlates with better reaction times & general fitness

I agree with your general point, but you can't just join up 2 correlations like that, that isn't always going to work when there are other confounding factors (and there always are). Wealth also correlates with age which anticorrelates with reaction times and general fitness.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#199

Post by pja » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 10:07 AM UTC

kristianc wrote: post #191

pja wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, wealthy drivers can afford to keep their cars in better shape and can afford better cars in the first place. Neither of these factors depend on self-driving technology. Secondly, Tesla themselves makes it clear that their self-driving can't be relied upon to driver the car unsupervised - the driver has to be paying attention at all times in case the Tesla self-driving code decides to do something catastrophi…

What I'm looking for really is anything specific to auto-pilot technology to suggest that the safety benefits won't also be met, or exceeded, when extrapolated across the whole population. All other factors taken into account, driving has become much, much safer in recent years, and is now safer than it ever was. When you start to use technology to eliminate driver errors in that self-same error-prone cohort, there's…

I’m suggesting that Tesla drivers are both relatively wealthy & /less/ error prone!

Clearly /if/ Tesla self-driving code is safer than the average driver then extending that to the general driving population would be a net good. But if the apparent safety is an artefact of the statistics due to Tesla cars themselves being intrinsically safer just as practically every other modern vehicle is a safer car than one built 20 years ago then extending self-driving to every vehicle might not be a net safety benefit

Likewise, if the driver cohort is different (and we know that it is different) from the general population & that cohort is required to drive the vehicle precisely at the times that the self-driving code can't cope which are probably the times when driving places the most demand on the driver, then that different in driver cohort matters: the statistical difference in death rates could easily be a result of differences in driver populations.

You can't tell from the data as given & the fact that Tesla keeps repeating the aggregate figures in their PR is suspicious frankly.

(NB. that paper you link simply underlines my point - In both countries, the lowest wealth quartile has a vastly greater death rate on the roads than the rest of the population. It doesn't matter whether Germany is worse or better than the US. If Tesla draws disproportionately from higher income deciles, then we should a priori expect them to have a far lower death rate than the mean. Quoting the mean as a benchmark to compare the Tesla death rate against is outright misleading.)

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#200

Post by newman8r » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 10:13 AM UTC

thinkloop wrote: post #189

jVinc wrote: post #159

I really hate the whole Tesla angle of "technically we are not lying but we know people are going to mis-remember and misrepresent what we are writing". Take for instance: > The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive... What this means is that during this incident there were No visual or audible clues that a crash was about to happen What they are saying is that while…

And look who fell for it (techcrunch): "However, it seems the driver ignored the vehicle’s warnings to take back control" [1] Followed by the quote from Tesla that at some point in the history of the ride a warning of some sort was given. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/30/tesla-says-fatal-crash-inv...

yeah that's pretty bad. I wonder if they'll correct it.