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An Update on Last Week’s Accident

tesla.com

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Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#311

Post by watertom »

wilun wrote: post #298
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…

Tesla always blame the "driver" (and publicly so, nonetheless) when they are killed by their "autopilot" (which is actually driving, that is fulfilling the purpose indicated by its name, despite being not very good at it...) -- either directly, or by carefully stating misleading statements that are both technically correct and incredibly dishonest in the context of both the events and the surrounding text. Why people…

You know how many plane crashes are not the fault of human error? Very few.

I have a friend that investigates planet crashes. He’s told me that between pilot error, human error, hubris, flying when conditions are too dangerous, poorly trained or sloppy mechanics only about about 1% really can’t be classified as being caused by humans. He said the stats are a bit skewed because like any organization that reports on human performance they’ve been influenced to be a bit “flexible” when assigning blame.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#312

Post by dghughes »

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.

But at some point between wealthy and rich the person hires a (non-wealthy) driver and now they're back to square one.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#313

Post by Arnt »

scoggs wrote: post #309
Arnt wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you expect 370% above average for any cohort? That's amazingly amazing. That must mean that some other cohorts are correspondingly far below the average, what are they?

Thank you. Do people really want Tesla to use another company's failure / worse #'s via statistics in their review of this accident? At least they are responsive, seemingly open, and seemingly empathetic. They are obviously handling things in a business first manner as corporations will but it hardly feels as inhuman as people seem to be making it out to be.

My question is honest. I found GP's assertion and its implication astonishing, but if that's how it is...

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#314

Post by mentos »

I wonder if Tesla can recreate the crash environment given the data captured from their sensors to reproduce the failure in a simulation?

See this article about a company attempting to do this in Unreal Engine 4

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/51vr-crafts-photorea...

Imagine a future where every car uploads their sensor data to reconstruct a growing 3D model of the road network. Using this network AI can simulate millions of miles of driving without ever risking a physical real world crash. Any update to the cars autopilot system could first prove itself against 1 billion miles of simulation before ever being deployed to the 'real' world.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#315

Post by TAForObvReasons »

scoggs wrote: post #309
Arnt wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you expect 370% above average for any cohort? That's amazingly amazing. That must mean that some other cohorts are correspondingly far below the average, what are they?

Thank you. Do people really want Tesla to use another company's failure / worse #'s via statistics in their review of this accident? At least they are responsive, seemingly open, and seemingly empathetic. They are obviously handling things in a business first manner as corporations will but it hardly feels as inhuman as people seem to be making it out to be.

You forget the key rule: "Move fast and break things", including people and expectations of human decency

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#316

Post by NelsonMinar »

watertom wrote: post #311
wilun wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla always blame the "driver" (and publicly so, nonetheless) when they are killed by their "autopilot" (which is actually driving, that is fulfilling the purpose indicated by its name, despite being not very good at it...) -- either directly, or by carefully stating misleading statements that are both technically correct and incredibly dishonest in the context of both the events and the surrounding text. Why people…

You know how many plane crashes are not the fault of human error? Very few. I have a friend that investigates planet crashes. He’s told me that between pilot error, human error, hubris, flying when conditions are too dangerous, poorly trained or sloppy mechanics only about about 1% really can’t be classified as being caused by humans. He said the stats are a bit skewed because like any organization that reports on hu…

Some of this is a quirk of how the NTSB reports accidents. For instance if a small plane suffers engine loss in flight, the cause of the accident will be listed as "failure of pilot to land the aircraft safely without power". Which is technically true, but most ordinary folks would blame the engine failure for the crash, not the pilot. It reflects a culture where the pilot is absolutely responsible for the aircraft and its passengers. That's the exact opposite of where the self-driving car industry is going.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#317

Post by crdoconnor »

jakecopp wrote: post #272
crdoconnor wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main thing that would make me convinced of the safety of self driving cars would be if the executives of self driving car companies took criminal liability for accidents caused by their cars or software. When the cost of them killing somebody by having a deficient QA process is minimal (and just affects shareholders), then the cars will be rolled out before they are ready. What will happen to liability at present…

I agree with your intention, though isn't it inevitable self driving cars will kill people even if they are 1000x safer than humans? If a CEO has many millions of cars running his software, their will always be a death. In that case, nobody would want to take on that responsibility so nobody would build self driving cars. Therefore humans will still drive cars and there will be 1000x more deaths, most preventable wit…

It's not the trolley problem because as yet we don't know how many people would be killed by rolling out self driving cars and, more to the point, the speed of rollout and safety are not necessarily inversely proportional.

By characterising self driving cars as a "trolley problem" you have presented what is known as a "false dilemma". Maybe you could read up on that ;)

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#318

Post by sgc »

arethuza wrote: post #254
tstrimple wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 still looks pretty risky to me - I compared a similar junction here in the UK near to where I live (on the M90 in Fife) and it has about 40 impact attenuation barrels in a triangle.

Those are also present in many locations in the US, although they seem to be phasing them out so I think they are considered old tech. I don't know the performance specs, but new cars are a lot smaller and safer than old cars - the same is probably true here too.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#319

Post by AsyncAwait »

mtgx wrote: post #218
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…

Also, ever notice how in none of the Tesla Autopilot accidents, Tesla finds itself guilty? I don't even read these posts from Tesla anymore because I know each one of them is just justification for how Tesla did nothing wrong, and it's the fault of the stupid human driver for using its Autopilot "wrong" and dying in the process. Meanwhile, Tesla is laughing all the way to the bank selling the usage of Autopilot as on…

Totally agree, which is why I refuse to automatically be hyped about everything that Musk does.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#320

Post by jakewins »

pja wrote: post #175
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 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…

> Don't tell us how safe Tesla's are compared to the entire US driving population: Tell us how safe they are compared to equivalent vehicles from other manufacturers.

I'm having a hard time to find an exact number comparison, but:

- Tesla claims 1 fatality per 320M miles

Compared to

- A 2015 study of 2011 model year vehicles showed, for instance, Volvo XC90 had never been involved in a driver fatality (1)

- There are about 10K 2011 XC90s in the US (2)

- Avg. US drivers cover 13,400miles / year (3)

So:

- 4 years studied * 10K vehicles * 13,400 avg miles -> 536,000,000 fatality-free miles

This is obviously super hand-wavy, but I think it's fair to state as a hypothesis that Tesla could be twice as deadly as the safest high-end vehicles.. you'd need to design some experiment to attempt to falsify it to feel confident this is correct.

(1) https://www.freep.com/story/news/nation/2015/01/29/study-cha...

(2) http://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-data/volvo/volvo-xc90/

(3) https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/25/the-averag...

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