411–420 of 447 posts
According to the IIHS, which is sponsored by insurance companies and rates cars for safety, for models years 2009-2012, the following cars have had zero fatalities: * Kia Sorento * Lexus RX 350 * Subaru Legacy * Mercedes Benz GL * Audi A4 4WD * Honda Odyssey * Toyota Highlander * Toyota Sequoia
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What irks me is that they think it's OK for them to advertise it as auto-pilot, with an asterisk pointing to the fine print that says "aw shucks, not actually, haha".
Well all that an actual autopilot (on a plane) does is maintain your velocity and heading, so if anything the name is underselling it.
I notice they don't mention that the driver complained that the autopilot had trouble with this specific spot on the highway a few times before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16719736
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This is probably the worst part about driving a Tesla: Your car is going to testify against you. Because Tesla can and will make a statement like this, and they will always throw you under the bus. Which is a terrible way to treat a customer, as a general practice.
> Your car is going to testify against you. Presumably Tesla/the car is telling the truth as it saw it. I don't think you're suggesting they're falsifying the logs. > Which is a terrible way to treat a customer I'd assume that Tesla sells you a vehicle, not PR or legal services that protect you in case of an accident. Your expectation that Tesla should take the blame is unreasonable by any standard.
I do think it's reasonable to ask of them to either keep completely silent; or to be completely open - perhaps by giving complete access to all data to a truly independent third party, and not picking which facts they think are fit for public consumption, and which are not.
I admire what Tesla has achieved - but this is a company under considerable pressure. They may well go bankrupt; and every incident matters. They are under terrible pressure to massage those facts to make them look good. I can't help but treat any statement like this no differently to any other ad - it's easily possible to be misleading even when there is some possible interpretation that isn't an intentional untruth.
Everybody knows people aren't good at sitting around doing nothing and maintaining focus. Distracted driving isn't a new risk. So the question is: are the safety benefits to a driver aid really greater than the risk they cause by encouraging distraction? Even if the driver aid catches 99% of all risks, that may yet be a net negative. Personally, I don't think it's reasonable for a system that encourages distracted driving to then claim it was the driver's fault they were distracted. No amount of small print or big fat warnings can ever excuse ignoring reality. If the autopilot is contributing to driver inattention, then the driver's inattention is no longer just the driver's fault. Not that I'm at all sure that's what's happening here, but there are some ominous indications, that is for sure. Without an autopilot, who takes their hands off the wheel for more than 6 seconds on a drive like that?
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> Your car is going to testify against you. Presumably Tesla/the car is telling the truth as it saw it. I don't think you're suggesting they're falsifying the logs. > Which is a terrible way to treat a customer I'd assume that Tesla sells you a vehicle, not PR or legal services that protect you in case of an accident. Your expectation that Tesla should take the blame is unreasonable by any standard.
I'm not saying Tesla is lying. But I am saying that I could spend six figures on a car from a company that is ready and waiting to stab me in the back. Or, I could spend five figures on a Toyota, knowing that Toyota is not going to sell me out if my car crashes. I mean, look, it makes sense Tesla has to defend itself, especially legally, but there's a big difference between pulling out the logs when you need to for t…
Whereas with Tesla, they're leveraged out to here with stock valuation based on promises and projections, and if their key tech is perceived as seriously flawed, they're not going to exist as a company in the long term.
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Well all that an actual autopilot (on a plane) does is maintain your velocity and heading, so if anything the name is underselling it.
autopilots do a bit more than maintain course, they can basically execute the entire flight-plan in between takeoff & landing, which includes plenty of heading adjustments. They also increasingly do a fair bit of heavy lifting on landings as well.
Just because an in-air navigation aid that allows for essentially pilot-free navigation deserving of the name "autopilot" happens to be relatively trivial to build, does not mean any navigation aid of similar complexity for other modes of transport should be called autopilot simply because they're at least as complex. If you're not automatically piloting, the name autopilot is pretty disingenuous, is it not?
Also, planes have a bunch of other navigation aids, including collision avoidance systems and ground-based air traffic control, and pretty obvious stuff like predictable flight paths and huge safety margins between nearby aircraft. An autopilot for an airplane works in that context. I kind of doubt it would work if there were thousands of planes nearby, many of which are on paths separated by distances the vehicles in question cover in tiny fractions of a second, and some of which follow almost invisible rather unpredictable paths (that drunk guy without lights over there...). Context matters.
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…
You could argue that Tesla should be compared to luxury vehicles (which have more safety features), but even if you just compare their crash rate against U.S. drivers of cars and light trucks, the Tesla Autopilot driver fatality rate is almost four times higher than typical passenger vehicles...
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…
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Yup this also mean that Tesla's radar and camera systems had 5 seconds to realize it was driving straight into an unmoving concrete barrier and did nothing...
What's really odd is, in my Subaru which has eyesight, if I drove straight towards that barrier the breaks would engage. Eyesight uses two visual cameras, about two feet apart, and uses the parallax between them to judge depth/distance (in the same way human eyesight judges depth). So even if Tesla's autopilot steered the vehicle towards that divider, shouldn't the auto-braking system have engaged to avert the accide…
The auto-braking in Subarus with eyesight can engage in two circumstances that I'm aware of.
1: The car is travelling at 50 km/hr or less, and perceives an oncoming obstacle.
2: The car is using adaptive cruise control, and perceives that it is getting too close to the vehicle ahead.
I think there are some circumstances where the designers decided that auto-braking would actually be worse. For instance, at highway speed, it's usually not possible to come to a stop quickly enough to avoid a stationary object that has somehow suddenly come into your path. Say, a deer. It's best to take your feet off both pedals and swerve around the obstacle. This reduces speed while also allowing maneuvering, something that braking works against. It also gives drivers behind you more time to react.
If the Tesla system works similarly I would expect similar design decisions. However, I would expect autopilot on a Tesla to function similarly to adaptive cruise control, which will jam on the brakes when it thinks it's going to hit something. This has actually engaged erroneously on two occasions for me, on windy roads, so I only use adaptive cruise control in straight-arrow highway situations now.
I've noticed that in certain weather conditions the cameras will stop being able to get good enough data to make decisions. The car disables the system and notifies me with a warning indicator.
tl;dr - auto-breaking based on parallax cameras can't be deployed in every situation, and sometimes the cameras can't get a clear shot.