Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident • Hacker News Board

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#51

Post by Declanomous » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 5:25 AM UTC

brandmeyer wrote: post #11

z6 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No real excuse for Tesla, but seriously why are our roads so bad. This is one of the wealthiest areas in the world and a busy stretch of road.

> but seriously why are our roads so bad. Degraded paint does not a bad road make. Roads are optimized for human drivers that can leverage additional context to make their decisions. Many countries don't even bother to stripe their roads at all.

Chicago doesn't stripe most of the roads. Most of the roads that have stripes in Chicago are administered by IDOT.

Chicago even has this codified in the traffic code; while the rest of the state has "improper lane usage" as a violation, Chicago has "failure to maintain a lane".

Even on roads with painted markings they get scraped off by snowplows almost every winter. I'm reasonably sure that's what happened to that gore.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#52

Post by carlivar » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 5:25 AM UTC

icc97 wrote: post #39

ChuckMcM wrote: post #17

I have now talked with two people who have autopilot in their model S's and both said the problem with autopilot is that it is "too good". Specifically it works completely correctly like 80 - 90% of the time and as a result, if you use it a lot, you start to expect it to be working and not fail. If it beeps then to tell you to take over, you have to mentally get back into the situational awareness of the road and the…

As far as I can tell there is no way to resolve this that will be effective. Google spoke about this problem publicly and why they directly targeted level 4. Train drivers are the closest thing and they have a lot of equipment that forces them to stay alert. Personally I think that autopilot should only take over when the driver is unwell or that it thinks there will be a crash. Even when driving full time drivers ge…

> they have a lot of equipment that forces them to stay alert.

As does Cadillac's Super Cruise system which is not getting the respect it should -- including by GM itself.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#53

Post by njarboe » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 5:25 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #17

I have now talked with two people who have autopilot in their model S's and both said the problem with autopilot is that it is "too good". Specifically it works completely correctly like 80 - 90% of the time and as a result, if you use it a lot, you start to expect it to be working and not fail. If it beeps then to tell you to take over, you have to mentally get back into the situational awareness of the road and the…

And in the current climate of "all new things must be super extra safe to be used, even if it displaces much worse technology", I think machine driving cars will have a hard time being accepted. Imagine the autopilot is 100 times safer than human drivers. Full implementation would mean about a fatality a day in the US. It does not seem this would be acceptable by the public even though 30,000 annual human car fatalities could be avoided. Maybe we should use our education system to help heal us from the safety first (do nothing) culture we seems to gotten our selves into in the US.

This is a similar situation to nuclear power. With nuclear, all your waste can be kept and stored and nuclear has almost zero deaths per year. Contrast to the crazy abomination that is coal burning.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#54

Post by RangerScience » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 5:27 AM UTC

danmaz74 wrote: post #34

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to learn how to use it properly and pay attention. I use it a lot and it can drive from San Francisco to LA pretty much without stopping. But every once in a while it does mess up and you just need to make sure you're watching and ready to take over quickly. I agree that it's good enough that people might stop paying attention, but they just need to realize that they have to hold the software's hand in these…

It you have to pay attention as much as if you were driving, then, what's the point of autopilot?

Actually... I notice my right hip and leg hurts in a pretty unique way after long drives, particularly if there's a lot of speed variance.

That might not be worth the full cost of autopilot (particularly compared with lane keepers), but it's a thing.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#55

Post by jijojv » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 5:27 AM UTC

oldgradstudent wrote: post #45

jijojv wrote: post #2

Week after the fatal accident Musk continues to promote Autopilot as safe by retweeting stuff like https://twitter.com/Teslarati/status/980476745106231297 Tesla Model S navigates one of Vienna’s ‘crappiest’ roads on Autopilot IIHS '17 study puts Autopilot at only reducing 40% accidents which is the same as their '16 study which had the same 40% reduction for any car with Auto Emergency Braking.

Wasn't the IIHS study relevant to the old Mobileye-based Autopilot? Any reason to assume it applies to Tesla's in-house Autopilot?

That may be correct as IIHS took few months and concluded in Jan'17. People are still waiting for in-house Autopilot aka AP2 to reach feature parity with mobileey AP1 if you follow https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/enhanced-ap-hw2-qa-fir... so i'd suspect AP2 to be worse-off depending on when it gets tested.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#56

Post by Declanomous » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 5:27 AM UTC

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #50

Vehicles with autonomous features will save lives. Fewer people will be injured or killed in cars that have these features. However, some people will still be injured or killed, and those people will comprise a different set than would otherwise have been harmed. They or their families will seek restitution and hence, the way forward will be determined by the courts.

The thing is that most driving deaths don't occur on the highway with dry-well lit roads, and current vehicles can't drive for shit in bad weather. So they shouldn't have autopilot on at all, they should just have the collision avoidance features on.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#57

Post by abalone » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 5:28 AM UTC

I wonder if this will be the case that really tests Tesla's blanket legal defense in court. (That accidents are due to less than "fully attentive" drivers.) The reaction time needed in that video to correct for the autopilot is downright scary.

It's a situation where if you were piloting yourself you're a lot more likely to have mentally mapped that you continue in a straight line at that point, so listing to the left is going to feel WRONG even when suddenly blinded by the sun. But if autopilot takes you there, and you're "lizard brain level" paying attention but didn't have that mental navigation map in your head, and the sun's in your eyes, you're going to take a few seconds to try to figure out how to correct so as not to make things worse. That's enough to hit the gore point in that video.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#58

Post by oldgradstudent » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 5:31 AM UTC

Tesla claimed[1] that:

> 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 and roughly 20,000 times since just the beginning of the year, and there has never been an accident that we know of. There are over 200 successful Autopilot trips per day on this exact stretch of road.

Which might be technically true, but conveniently ignores other, very similar crashes.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/what-we-know-about-last-weeks-acc...

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#59

Post by throwaway84742 » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 5:35 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #17

I have now talked with two people who have autopilot in their model S's and both said the problem with autopilot is that it is "too good". Specifically it works completely correctly like 80 - 90% of the time and as a result, if you use it a lot, you start to expect it to be working and not fail. If it beeps then to tell you to take over, you have to mentally get back into the situational awareness of the road and the…

Uncanny valley of autonomy I guess. Google has noticed this early on, and their answer was to remove the steering wheel completely from their campus-only autonomous vehicles. Either it’s very close to 100% level 5 (you can pay no attention whatsoever and trust the car 100%), or it’s explicitly level 2 (advanced ADAS essentially), there’s nothing in between that’s not inherently dangerous.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#60

Post by oldgradstudent » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 5:36 AM UTC

doe88 wrote: post #37

ChuckMcM wrote: post #17

I have now talked with two people who have autopilot in their model S's and both said the problem with autopilot is that it is "too good". Specifically it works completely correctly like 80 - 90% of the time and as a result, if you use it a lot, you start to expect it to be working and not fail. If it beeps then to tell you to take over, you have to mentally get back into the situational awareness of the road and the…

This. I don't know I feel ambivalent about autopilot right now, as most on HN I always crave for new technologies, but the fact that something very dangerous can be very good most of the time and very bad occasionally make me weary of using it altogether. I know that's irrational because most often then not it probably saves you from your own mistakes. Also, if Tesla intends to shield itself behind a beta status for…

Why are they allowed to put beta software on public roads where third parties that never consented to their EULA are put at risk.

If they want beta software on a private track, that's their (and their insurance company's) problem.