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Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the nebulous and ill-defined "disengagements" in the public CA reports. The usual description of disengagements: "Disengage for a perception discrepancy" or "Precautionary takeover to address perception". Except when referring to others, then its plain English: "Disengage for a recklessly behaving road user" or "Other road user behaving poorly".

For clarity on this point, "disengagement" has a specific meaning to the California DMV[0]: > For the purposes of this section, “disengagement” means a deactivation of the autonomous mode when a failure of the autonomous technology is detected or when the safe operation of the vehicle requires that the autonomous vehicle test driver disengage the autonomous mode and take immediate manual control of the vehicle. Howev…

And even this pathetic and tootheless regulation was enough to drive Uber from California for a while.

With all the games they play with the numbers, Waymo still reports 63 safety-related disengagements for a mere 352,000 miles. This doesn't sound like an acceptable level of safety.

The surprising part is that it appears that Waymo is planning to start deploying their system in 2018. How can they even consider it with this amount of disengagements?

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

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Biggest factor to control for is drunk driving, which is ~30% of all deaths IIRC.

It's 28% in 2016 according to NHTSA [0], 10,497 deaths.

Certainly auto-pilot is worth it if the driver is drunk. I wish that all cars were fitted with alcohol measuring devices so that the cars won't start if you're over the limit.

Drink driving is still a massive problem in Belgium where I live. Although you get severely fined (thousands of euros) it's up to a judge to decide if you should have your licence taken away [1]. Typically you have to sit by the side of the road for a few hours then you're allowed to continue. In the UK it is a minimum 1 year ban.

[0]: https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving

[1]: http://archive.etsc.eu/documents/C.pdf

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

#153
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly! To you its crystal clear, but if the other party were additionally considering all the non-highway accidents, then the distinction may not be so clear to them until you provided the additional metadata.

Now consider how you may feel about a car which has decided based on all available data that this strip of road is a lane. Its crystal clear to that car until its suddenly not.

You reacted with what appeared to me to be very restrained aggression (typical and acceptable, no offense intended) as you struggled to figure out if they were just being dense on purpose or were actually ignorant. I dont feel either were accurate but your message conveyed that was what you felt to me.

A car simply says “hey i dont know what im doing anymore. Help!”

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

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, that's incredibly bad. I drive that route all the time and it's not even remotely difficult to follow the highway there. Considering Tesla's must have driven through there hundreds of thousands of times, they should have data to make sure the car at least follows the highway. I don't crash in to a barrier when a paint stripe gets scuffed in between my Monday morning commute and my Tuesday morning commute.

It's not so simple - you can't simply follow the highway as you have done hundreds of thousands of times, because if the paint stripes have changed since Monday, then these might also be new (or temporary) stripes painted by a road construction crew overnight and you now must follow the new stripes.

Now imagine all people have Tesla, and someone makes a prank on the middle of a bridge, they paint a line that makes all traffic plunge down, imagine now that they are so confident they removed the driver seat, you have all those passengers looking on the windows on how their cars are driving them to their deaths and there is nothing they can do.

So should this cars follow some line blindly?

I think that this tech should stil be called a drive assist, and assist the driver, Tesla rushed it in enabling the autopilot thing, I am sure if you compare the stats with similar cars(expensive,safe and with drive assist) the stats will be against autopilot, I do not understand why they had to rush the autopilot and not keep it as a driver assist, to warn you and prevent some crashes)though it seems it can't protect from frontal collisions with static objects)

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

#155
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...

That is not the location of the accident. The accident happened at the HOV left exit from 101 to 85.

Streetview:

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4112791,-122.076645,3a,75y,9...

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

#156
post #155
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...

That is not the location of the accident. The accident happened at the HOV left exit from 101 to 85. Streetview: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4112791,-122.076645,3a,75y,9...

Sep. '17 crash was at 92/880

March '18 was at 101/85

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

#157
post #148
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airline pilot training is designed to handle this, as well as they have a co-pilot who prevents them from being distracted and is able to take over if they are distracted. Tesla is just handing it out to anyone who can afford to buy a Model S/X (and now Model 3) with the absolute minimum of warnings that they can get away with.

I would not be surprised if Musk coldly responded that this is a known problem with no solution, but autopilot still lowers the death rate on average. In other words, for the proponents it's a trade-off. And also the idea that an automatic driver is easier to improve over time (skewing the trade-off better and better) than human drivers. Which of course will snowball when reliance on automation keeps making drivers w…

I don't think that's the correct answer. Flight autopilots have lowered accident rates tenfold, but every time there is a crash while on autopilot Boeing/Airbus will ground every single plane of that type and won't allow them to fly until the problem is found and fixed. If I know that my car's autopilot is statistically less likely to kill me than I am to kill myself, I would still much much rather drive myself.

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

#158
post #42
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. That was in Chicago. It also was reproduced exactly in CA crash location in https://electrek.co/2018/04/03/tesla-autopilot-crash-barrier...

Indeed. His Tesla was clearly following the clearest left-side white line. Which unfortunately pointed the car right at the gore point. But what amazes me is that Tesla autopilot apparently won't swerve or stop when it sees an unmoving object straight ahead. Whether it's a semi, a fire truck, or a gore point. But I gather that trying to detect that stuff generates too many false positives. And that overall, it would…

But what amazes me is that Tesla autopilot apparently won't swerve or stop when it sees an unmoving object straight ahead.

It won't even brake unless the thing in front looks like the back end of a car or truck. Even then, if it's stationary, it may still get hit. It won't swerve, ever; it has no logic for that. Four times that we know of, a Tesla has plowed into a vehicle partly blocking a lane.

Putting something on the road which pretends to self-drive and can't detect solid obstacles is criminal.

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Considering that tesla w/ autopilot enabled is less safe than tesla w/ autopilot disabled, I'm going to go with "no, if you control for those factors it doesn't reduce fatalities".

Source?

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

#160
post #148
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airline pilot training is designed to handle this, as well as they have a co-pilot who prevents them from being distracted and is able to take over if they are distracted. Tesla is just handing it out to anyone who can afford to buy a Model S/X (and now Model 3) with the absolute minimum of warnings that they can get away with.

I would not be surprised if Musk coldly responded that this is a known problem with no solution, but autopilot still lowers the death rate on average. In other words, for the proponents it's a trade-off. And also the idea that an automatic driver is easier to improve over time (skewing the trade-off better and better) than human drivers. Which of course will snowball when reliance on automation keeps making drivers w…

At the moment Tesla haven't shown that auto-pilot does lower the death rate. They've only released statistics about auto-pilot enabled cars rather than statistics for when auto-pilot was in control.

Any statistics released by Tesla should be compared against similar statistics from say modern Audis with lane-assist and collision detection.

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