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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

#221

Post by m_mueller »

njarboe wrote: post #218
m_mueller wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just throwing something at the wall here: Just start with a purely assistive package like most big manufacturers have. Let buyers opt-in to a test program (giving them, say, a 3% reduction on the list price), where all their inputs and outputs are recorded and sent to the manufacturer. Manufacturer can now assimilate that data into a model of car and road and test their fully autonomous software on that model and…

Sort of assuming Tesla is doing this already.

If they do I'm surprised of the latest accident tbh.

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

#222

Post by sschueller »

antirez wrote: post #200

What is happening was clear to many since the start: Tesla incarnates the behavior of his founder, exaggerating the technology that is really available right now, and selling it as a product without the premise for it to be safe. A product that kinda drives your car but sometimes fails, and requires you to pay attention, is simply a crash that we are waiting to happen. And don't get trapped by the "data driven" analy…

How can anyone take a company serios that sells features such as "Bio-Weapon Defense Mode". It almost sounds like snake oil and not far from something like the ADE 651.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651

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

#223

Post by simias »

antirez wrote: post #200

What is happening was clear to many since the start: Tesla incarnates the behavior of his founder, exaggerating the technology that is really available right now, and selling it as a product without the premise for it to be safe. A product that kinda drives your car but sometimes fails, and requires you to pay attention, is simply a crash that we are waiting to happen. And don't get trapped by the "data driven" analy…

I agree with most of your points however I'm not convinced by your problem number 2:

>you should check the autopilot against a rested and concentrated driver that drives slowly and with a lot of care. Since in the statistics otherwise you do not account for the fact that when you drive, you are in control, and you can decide your level of safety. Such a diligent driver that goes to crash because of an immature software is terrible.

I think you overestimate the rationality of human beings. I commute to work by motorcycle every day and I've noticed that I tend to ride more dangerously (faster, "dirtier" passes etc...) when I'm tired, which rationally is stupid. I know that but I still instinctively do it, probably because I'm in a rush to get home or because I feel like the adrenaline keeps me awake.

This is an advantage of autonomous vehicles, they can be reasonable when I'm not. I expect that few drivers (and especially everyday commuters like me) constantly drive "slowly and with a lot of care". A good enough autonomous vehicle would.

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

#224

Post by antirez »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #207
antirez wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"too good" -> "completely correctly like 80 - 90%". I'm unable to make the two sentences make sense in the same statement, since 85% looks extremely low to be considered too good, given that the outcome is to crash if you do not pay attention in the 15%.

Some people do it. Think of it as 0-100 scale, 0 useless, 100 making no mistake ever, and not as some percent of correct action.

IMHO this is kinda of a mental trick. How good it is an hammer that allows you to place a nail 90% of times? Percentage of failures is not usefulness, or a value of perfection, like: I'm 80% handsome, that is a lot handsome. Something that has 20% of failures rate instead is terrible.

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

#225

Post by DanBC »

EnderMB wrote: post #210
namelost wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A high rate of road deaths isn't a fait accompli. Musk would have us believe that technology is the only answer. The UK has the 2nd-lowest rate of road deaths in the world (after Sweden). The roads in the UK are not intrinsically safe, they are very narrow both in urban and rural areas which means there are more hazards and less time to avoid them. However, the UK has strict driver education programme. It is not easy…

As someone that has been caught speeding, it's also worth mentioning that one of the big reasons why the UK has improved its road safety statistics is a reasonably new initiative where you get an option on your first offence to either take the points on your license or to attend a safety workshop. IIRC, the workshop was about three hours, but it was surprisingly useful. The instructors treated you like adults and not…

> However, on the drink driving front, given the news with Ant from Ant and Dec I think it's safe to assume that not everyone gets a prison sentence for drink driving.

Has he been sentenced?

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

#226

Post by Nokinside »

antirez wrote: post #200

What is happening was clear to many since the start: Tesla incarnates the behavior of his founder, exaggerating the technology that is really available right now, and selling it as a product without the premise for it to be safe. A product that kinda drives your car but sometimes fails, and requires you to pay attention, is simply a crash that we are waiting to happen. And don't get trapped by the "data driven" analy…

Designing for safety means that you take into account human behavior at every level and engineer the product to avoid those mistakes.

We already know that there is an area between drive assistant and automatic driving where people just can't keep their attention level where it needs to be. Driving is activity that maintains attention. People can't watch the road hand on the wheel when nothing happens and keep their level of attention up when the car is driving.

The way I see it, the biggest safety sin from Tesla is having experimental beta feature that that is known weak point for humans. Adding potentially dangerous experimental feature, warning about it, then washing your hands about it is not good safety engineering.

The news story points out how other car manufacturers have cameras that watch the driver for the signs of inattention. Driving assistant should watch both the driver and the road. You can't have a driving assistant that can be used as an autopilot.

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

#227

Post by BinaryIdiot »

lozenge wrote: post #166
Animats wrote: post #163

Come to think of it, whatever happened to Tesla's self-driving effort? They claimed to be shipping Model 3 cars with all the hardware needed for self driving (not including a LIDAR). They produced videos. Most of this was 1-2 years ago. But they never got to deployment, or even to the point of demoing it for car magazine writers.

They had a falling out with their software supplier Mobileye which set them back a year or more.

Was it really that much of a setback? It was my understanding they used some of their own software in combination and had already planned to take over the role Mobileye was serving.

Maybe I bought too much into their PR spin but it sounded as if it was barely a delay.

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

#228

Post by XorNot »

edelans wrote: post #190
buvanshak wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but autopilot still lowers the death rate on average. I think the question of using self driving vehicles comes down to this. Do you want to be part of a statistics that you can control, or do you want to be part of one that you cannot? When we go in trains or planes, we are already being part of statistics that we cannot control. But those things also are extremely reliable. So there seems to be a threshold, where…

> be part of a statistics that you can control well, even if you are in control with your hands on the wheel, you can still get heart (and even die) in a car accident where you have no responsibility at all. Sure you can control your car, but you cannot control others'... (this is even more obvious from a cyclist point of view)

Also people vastly overestimate their driving competence.

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

#229

Post by oldgradstudent »

njarboe wrote: post #212
oldgradstudent wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your dad would be happy to get a car that was 10X less safe, but the rest of us on the road will be less so. These are public roads, driving a dangerous cars put other people at risk.

What fraction of current drivers are 10x less safe? Probably all 16-20 year olds.

Probably around 3-4x[1], but point taken.

Inexperienced drivers cannot be avoided, but many states try mitigate the risk by limiting teenage drivers.

But my point is that whether to allow a vehicle that is not safer than a reasonable human driver should be not left to the car owner alone - there are other stakeholders whose interests must be taken into account.

[1] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/teenagers/fatalityfacts/te...

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

#230

Post by philbarr »

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…

> Train drivers are the closest thing and they have a lot of equipment that forces them to stay alert.

Except they sometimes fall asleep: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-39457148

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