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

#231

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:40 AM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#232

Post by cam_l » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:41 AM UTC

adanto6840 wrote: post #182

cam_l wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't understand why, if the driver does not take control when the car has sensed an issue, it does not just throw on hazards and roll slow or stop. Seems like the safest way to keep people from dying.

Can you think of any reasons or situations where that logic fails? I can think of tons. The very challenging, and somewhat unusual given the life/death stakes, aspect of this domain in general is that general 'easy' logic works for 99% of the scenarios. But in the remaining 1% -- and I mean every single possible last scenario, whether probable or not -- the "what to do" is so much more difficult. Enough time to do it…

slowing down should be the first thing a car does in these scenarios. the confidence factor matters less as speed approaches zero.

seriously, i slow down when i am unsure of the conditions, i surely have never evaluated every last scenario, and i have never run into a concrete barrier.

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

#233

Post by smoyer » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:43 AM UTC

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…

4. There is another completely unknown variable - how many times would the autopilot have crashed if the human hadn't taken over. So Tesla's statistics are actually stating how safe the autopilot and human are when combined, not how safe the autopilot is by itself.

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

#234

Post by mtgx » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:44 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…

> Makes me wonder how this gets resolved without jumping through the gap to 'perfect' autopilot.

The solution is easy, but probably not what many would like to hear: ban all "self-driving" or "near-self-driving" solutions from being activated by the driver, and only allow the ones that have gone through very rigorous and extensive government testing (in a standardized test).

When the government certifies the car for Level 4 or Level 5, and assuming the standardized test has strict requirements like 1 intervention at 100,000 miles or whatever is something around 10-100x better than our best drivers, then the car can be allowed on the road.

Any lesser technology can still be used in other cars, bit instead of being a "self-driving mode" it should actually just assist you in the sense of auto-braking when an imminent accident is about to happen, or maybe just warn you that an imminent accident is about to happen, which could still significantly improve driver safety on the road until we figure out Level 5 cars.

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

#235

Post by donkeyd » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:46 AM UTC

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…

What makes the "self driving" functionally that all the other brands are marketing different though? Is it only that Tesla was first? Volvo literally calls their technology Autopilot too.

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

#236

Post by mtgx » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:47 AM UTC

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #84

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?

Trust me, it's still a huge relief. A day and night difference. Try it on a long drive, like LA to San Francisco and you'll see what I mean. It kind of feels like you're in the passenger seat rather than the drivers seat, but you can still grab the controls if you need to.

Again, you're making the same mistake op talked about - that the Autopilot works 80-90% so you'll keep letting it drive you while you relax, which means it's just a matter of time until you'll crash.

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

#237

Post by mtgx » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:49 AM UTC

dawnerd wrote: post #199

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…

Best solution is to keep the driver engaged, IE still holding the wheel and showing they are paying attention. It's how all the other cars with lane assist do it. Cant go more than 30 seconds of not touching the wheel before it complains. It's not perfect but it sure beats the driver being so used to it they start doing other things like watching movies on their laptop.

No that's not the best solution. The best solution is to not have it at all until it's actually good enough to self-drive you.

30 seconds is a HUGE amount of time to react on a highway. You'll be long dead by the time another 25 seconds pass if the accident happens just 5 seconds after you took your hands off the wheel. And this is exactly what happened in the recent crash.

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

#238

Post by simion314 » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:49 AM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #147

simion314 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you also have older cars with less safety features, not sure how is in US but in other countries you can stil see old cars that are missing airbags. So in fatalities statistics the fair thing is to compare Tesla with similar cars.

That’s a good point. Not just airbags. It starts to be common to have cars that apply the brakes automatically when they anticipate a collision. I think some research has been done on cars being designed to do less damage to a pedestrian in a collision, I don’t know if it has lead to design changes. Self driving cars may end up being only marginally safer than other new cars. But safety is not in my opinion the main…

If we do not push for safety then the manufacturers would invent some bad statistics and cheap out on sensors and engineering after they pass the bad statistics percentage.

The traffic issue it won't be actually solved with this kind of self driving cars, you would need new infrastructure, like modern metros/trains.

The dream of fast moving self driving cars, like a sword, I don't think is possible without a huge infrastructure change and I think the sword of cars would need a central point of control.

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

#239

Post by LoSboccacc » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:51 AM UTC

0xB31B1B wrote: post #128

creato wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are clearly not the only two options. Waymo appears to be far and away the leader in this space, and they've killed zero people.

Yea, most self driving miles are simulated, not done in meat space.

5 million are in meat space, too few to derive anything about safety since on average a fatal crash happens every 100Mmiles

Can't find how many of these miles were driven on roads with a posted limit above 35mph

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

#240

Post by mtgx » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:53 AM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #47

dangero wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I fail to see how an obstacle as large as a divider is not seen in time. If this is the case, then the system is inadequate to see many types of debris that could be on the road.

Well, it also apparently can't detect stationary semi trailers or fire trucks. So expecting it to detect a little gore point is iffy. But why can't it?

I think the reason is obvious: the hardware and software tech is just not there yet.

The hardware that may be actually required to make this work well may still cost tens of thousands of dollars, which means car makers will avoid using it and will use cheaper options like cameras and radar.

While on the software side, we may be 80% of the road there, but the other 20% and solving every single edge case out of potentially millions will take another decade or more.

And that's without even mentioning software bugs that could make the whole system crash. I think someone mentioned recently that there are on average 15 bugs every 1,000 lines or code or something. Either way, we should expect a lot of bugs to be in this software. Remember Toyota's "spaghetti code"? And now we're just going to assume that Toyota's self-driving cars are going to drive us safely within 3 years?

And of course nobody wants to talk about how these cars will be hacked remotely.