Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

abc7news.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 581 posts

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

#91

Post by danso »

brennankreiman wrote: post #28

Biggest thing I gathered was the public safety barrier was damaged from a previous crash, 12 days earlier, so the driver basically hit a hard wall. This has more implications for the US’s infrastructure than Tesla’s safety IMO.

via an earlier story: http://abc7news.com/automotive/exclusive-i-team-investigates...

> CalTrans finally sent ABC7 News a statement later Thursday"confirming" it's their policy to fix broken safety barriers within seven days, or five business days ... but storms delayed the work. As Dan Noyes reported Wednesday, the family told me they believe Walter Huang would have survived, if CalTrans fixed that safety barrier in a timely fashion.

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

#92

Post by danmaz74 »

RangerScience wrote: post #54
danmaz74 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, physical fatigue. I didn't consider that; it's not really what I'm waiting autopilot for, but it's indeed something useful :)

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

#93

Post by JKCalhoun »

Someone1234 wrote: post #5
bobsil1 wrote: post #3

Gore point stripe faded: https://imgur.com/a/xHq57 Street View: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.6346515,-122.104109,3a,75y,8...

If your point is "Autopilot only works on perfect roads" then they might have well pull the plug right now. Dirt, snow, rain, fog, dark, and other common conditions could obscure even correctly painted lines, and it just isn't realistic to expect perfect roads throughout such a large network anyway (in particular as human drivers can infer the line is meant to be there from the neighboring lines). At its core, a syst…

> If your point is "Autopilot only works on perfect roads" then they might have well pull the plug right now.

It's even worse: wait until someone does something malicious to an autopilot car to cause it to crash/kill.

I hate to be so cynical, but if you're developing this stuff, you have to imagine worst case scenarios. And there are much much worse scenarios when malice is involved.

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

#94

Post by greenleafjacob »

njarboe wrote: post #53
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 fatalit…

> Similar situation to nuclear power.

I think the issue with nuclear power is more the size of the blast radius. For example, the U.S. population within 50 miles of the Indian Point Energy Center is >17,000,000 including New York City [1]. The blast radius of a self-driving car is a few dozen people at best. It's not evident that nuclear technology is uniformly better than solar or wind, but it's probably expected-value positive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerick_Generating_Station

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

#95

Post by buvanshak »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #31
otalp wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does Musk have to do for him to be investigated for misleading consumers or fraud?

He definitely has a penchant for exaggeration if not outright dishonesty. It bothers me that people respect someone who can say so many blatantly false things and that an engineer can be so loose with the truth. That's his shtick though, promise unbelievable things, then when you get halfway there, people don't care you were wrong and/or lying. He understands how to market himself and his ventures. My guess is he's g…

>It bothers me that people respect someone who can say so many blatantly false things and that an engineer can be so loose with the truth.

Why does it bother you though. "People" are like that, right? If you know your target demographics, and thus know what strings to pull, then you can make your target do anything. In this case, invest, financially and emotionally in what ever he is doing. Pretty basic advertising.

Elon Musk's target demographics is the "tech" inclined (administrators and layman alike. America is the greatest country in the world!, Yay!), and what he is doing is to exactly cater to that target. What you see is just a manifestation of that.

Again, pretty basic advertising/marketing tactics. But I think it is for the first time we are seeing PR tactics that are tailored to the nerds/techies. That it why this seems so effective..

In someway, I think Elon Musk is to tech what Christopher Nolan is to movies..

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

#96

Post by roenxi »

m_mueller wrote: post #61
njarboe wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fatalit…

Does it currently really reduce fatalities if you control for car cost, age group and area driven? I‘m unconvinced of the current statistics.

I'm not reading a position in what you've said, but there is an observation here to draw out for the crowd. It doesn't matter all that much if after controlling for those variables it is relatively less safe; in absolute terms it just needs to be as safe as the worst human drivers.

That is, we have an accepted safety standard - by definition, the worst human driver with a license. If a Tesla is safer than that, the rest is theoretically preferences and economics.

I'm not saying that the regulators or consumers will accept that logic - if airlines are any example to go buy, they'll take the opportunity to push standards higher - but I think the point is interesting and important. It is easy to smother progress if we don't acknowledge that the world is a dangerous place and everything has elements of risk.

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

#97

Post by danso »

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #80
twblalock wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't trust you to be able to snap out of a distracted state and take control of a car in a situation you may or may not have been paying attention to. I don't trust you to do that, I don't trust the driver behind me to do that, and I don't trust the drivers to the left and to the right of me to do that. I should not need to trust you -- if I trusted you, why would we need autopilot at all? Humans are either qualif…

Please. You should see me when the car isn't on AutoPilot. I speed excessively, weave through LA traffic switching lanes frequently and generally exhibit unsafe driving behavior. I can't help it, it's like I get bored or something. I'm a decent driver and have never gotten in a crash but have gotten a lot of tickets. When I use AutoPilot, the car automatically maintains a reasonable distance at a fixed speed. You nee…

The 3 Autopilot deaths so far involved 3 relatively young men, both in relatively elite professions: former Navy SEAL and an Apple engineer -- the third was a son of a Chinese business owner [0]. They fit the profile of men fairly confident about driving and tech, perhaps too confident. 3 fatalities over 320 million miles for Teslas equipped with Autopilot hardware is not much better than the 1.16/100 million miles fatality rate of all American drivers and vehicles.

[0] https://jalopnik.com/two-years-on-a-father-is-still-fighting...

edit: corrected a typo

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

#98

Post by z6 »

cheschire wrote: post #46
z6 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Which developed countries don't have road markings on highways? Paint is just one aspect. There are also plenty of cracks and uneven pavement as you can see from the street view.

You said road, he said road. The additional caveat of “highway” wasn’t added until you realized his mental model was different than yours. Now imagine trying to teach a car these things!

A highway is a road. The context is quite clear since we're talking about the crash site.

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

#99

Post by danso »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #43
twblalock wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't trust you to be able to snap out of a distracted state and take control of a car in a situation you may or may not have been paying attention to. I don't trust you to do that, I don't trust the driver behind me to do that, and I don't trust the drivers to the left and to the right of me to do that. I should not need to trust you -- if I trusted you, why would we need autopilot at all? Humans are either qualif…

1.3 million people a year die in car crashes. Humans are woefully unqualified to pilot heavy machinery on a daily basis. Tesla’s Autopilot reduces crashes by 40% according to the NHTSA, so I can’t agree with your binary argument. Whether you trust others is immaterial; statistics will be the final arbitor. If Autopilot still causes fatal accidents, but fewer fatal accidents than humans alone, how could you argue agai…

> Tesla’s Autopilot reduces crashes by 40% according to the NHTSA

This claim was immediately called into suspicion when it was first published, and the NHTSA is currently facing a FOIA lawsuit for refusing to release data to independent researchers.

http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/quality-control-...

https://jalopnik.com/feds-cant-say-why-they-claim-teslas-aut...

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

#100

Post by worldsayshi »

nikofeyn wrote: post #33
schoen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brad Templeton has some very relevant discussion of this in https://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/levels.html including > There is additional controversy, it should be noted, about the proposed level 2. In level 2, the system drives, but it is not trusted, and so a human must always be watching and may need to intervene on very short notice -- sub-second -- to correct things if it makes a mistake. [...] As such, w…

i don’t see why it’s controversial. just look at drivers now. many are already on human autopilot checking their phone, eating, etc. if you give any amount of automation but that which still requires checking in from the human, humans will almost universally check out and crashes will be prevalent. autonomous driving will simply not work without full, unsupervised driving. i don’t understand why this is even a discus…

One solution would be to make the autopilot worse within the realm of safe driving. Make it so that it continuously makes safe errors that the driver has to correct. Like steering off into an empty lane. Slowing down. Etc.

Defining safe errors might be a challenge though.

Post reply on HN