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An Update on Last Week’s Accident

tesla.com

201–210 of 447 posts

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#201
post #178
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

somebody literally walked in front of their car.. The analysis I've seen suggested that the self-driving system in the Uber vehicle had 4 or 5 seconds to detect the pedestrian crossing the road in front of them. Driving into a pedestrian on the road in that circumstance is /not/ acceptable for any driver, be they human or automated. Don't be fooled by the video footage Uber released from the in-car camera - the quali…

It is acceptable though, most people wouldn't even get involuntary manslaughter which still requires criminal negligence. People are really spouting off here and project in their own superiority onto the situation. It's a situation similar to when a child gets left in a car or jumps a zoo fence, "I never take my eye off my kids even for one second even when I'm sleeping. I would never allow that to happen to my kids.…

> It is acceptable though [to drive into a pedestrian]

No. Children wander into roads. Drivers have a responsibility to keep an eye out for the unexpected. They are faultless only if they were driving responsibly and had no opportunity to react — neither of which were the case with the Uber.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#203
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…

>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.

Agreed, hence my parenthetical note at the bottom of the comment.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#204
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont see it

It's in the techcrunch image, not the imgur. The barrier with the yellow face is designed to collapse. https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/screen-sho...

that image also makes me wonder if tesla's system is designed to identify knocked-over cones. It's one of those things that would be easy to code for, but also easy to overlook.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#205

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…

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?

That's an awfully long risk compensation feedback loop to close! It sounds like a plausible motivation for Tesla to care more about the quality of their self-driving code than they otherwise might, but it would be a bit difficult to run the counter factual experiment to actually prove it one way or the other :)

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#206
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the autopilot did something a human driver who was paying attention would never do. Then how did the crushed barrier get crushed before the Tesla hit it? Clearly, the stretch of road is unsafe enough to trick humans drivers (and, clearly, Tesla should improve).

I'm obviously not privy to the details of the prior crash, but I'm pretty sure any healthy human would not deliberately drive into the barrier. The most likely scenarios I can think of would be not paying attention and drifting into the barrier, attempting to avoid a car merging into the lane (and not paying enough attention), or being struck by another car and being forced into the barrier.

Prior crash was a DUI.[1]

[1] http://abc7news.com/automotive/exclusive-i-team-investigates...

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#207
post #83

"The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken." This seems to be trying to suggest that the driver had 6 seconds of clear driving-toward-death time to correct for the car's actions without explicitly making such a ridiculous statement (while also throwing in the crushed crash attenuat…

They also said in their first post they would respect the family by not updating until the investigation was over. The investigation isn't over but here they are trying to manage their image with confusing and misleading partial information.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#208

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 keepin…

The article doesn't say when the visual and audible alerts happened, they could have been minutes previous on another stretch of road.

I agree he should have disabled Autopilot there if he knew it was an issue, however why didn't Tesla recommend that to him when he made the report? And the removal of the concrete barrier may have been a new factor that he didn't expect and caused Autopilot to fail much more severely.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#209
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a median in the middle of the highway. The car probably continued in a straight line instead of "steering into" a barrier. https://imgur.com/a/iMY1x

Why the car was not able to detect and avoid the collision in such a simple situation (from a human POV)? We have seen Tesla's autopilot performing very well in a much more complex scenario than this. Ref:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FadR7ETT_1k

Stationary obstacles are a harder problem, because there are so many stationary objects and features around a road that have to be ignored.

This autopilot incident is similar to the one with the tractor-trailer[1] in that regard.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/30/tesla-aut...

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