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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

#391
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From https://www.tesla.com/autopilot : "All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver" Why do we keep referring to something that we understand should require human supervision as "auto"? Stop the marketing buzzfeed and let's be real.

I agree that since that statement is at the top of the /autopilot page may insinuate that that's what Autopilot is, but that statement is describing the hardware on the cars rather than the software. I think that's intended to be read as "if you buy a new Tesla, you'll be able to add the Full Self-Driving Capability with a future software update; no hardware updates required." It could be made more clear, though.

The autopilot page needs to start with a description of what autopilot is, and then farther down the page, the point about not having to buy new hardware for "full" self driving could be made. This probably still needs a disclaimer that that is the belief of the company, not a proven concept.

But that's not going to happen, because Tesla wants to deceive some people into believing that autopilot is "full self driving" so they will buy the car.

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

#392

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…

Everyone talking about statistical evidence should take a look at this NHTSA report [1]. For example, "Figure 11. Crash Rates in MY 2014-16 Tesla Model S and 2016 Model X vehicles Before and After Autosteer Installation", where they are 1.3 and 0.8 per million miles respectively. Unfortunately, this report seems to have shot itself in the foot by apparently using 'Autopilot' and 'Autosteer' interchangeably, so it lea…

I mentioned this in a reply to another comment, but the NHTSA findings have apparently raised suspicions in other researchers. Currently, the DOT/NHTSA are facing a FOIA lawsuit for not releasing data (they assert that the data reveals Tesla trade secrets) that can be used to independently verify the study's conclusion:

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

#393
post #380

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…

> 1. Ethical. One thing is that you do a stupid thing and die. Another is that a technology fails in trivial circumstances that in theory are avoidable. A doctor can make also errors, but a medical device is required to be very safe and reliable in what it does. This needs elaboration or citation. You're one of the only folks I've seen come straight out and make this point: that somehow a technology or practice that…

I think the point he's making is that it's worse if a person dies because of something they have no control over (self-driving car malfunction) than if a person dies because of their own stupid choices (driving drunk, driving too fast for conditions, running red lights, etc).

This, of course, ignores the fact that stupid choices drivers make tend to affect other people on the road who did nothing wrong, so the introduction of a self-driving car which makes less stupid decisions would reduce deaths from both categories of people here.

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

#394
I'm going to wait five to ten years before I get my robot car. Let all those early adopters be the guinea pigs we need to reach that level of robot cars being safer then human drivers.

It seems tons of upper middle class to wealthy people are lining up to pay dearly with their wallets and lives to be a billionaire's crash test dummy.

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

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that but people will happily drive at 50+ down a narrow country road. I think the "narrow = slower" only works for a limited period of time before people get normalised to it.

Had to thread a van through a temporary concrete width restriction the other day - when it's that narrow, even the Uber behind me wasn't giving me grief for going that slowly! The country roads one has always dumbfounded me though - why some of those have national speed limits I will never know.

As far as I'm aware, they're national speed limits because they don't have the resource to work out the limit, or police them. I learnt on country roads and my instructor was very clear that although I could go at 60mph, I should drive to the conditions of the road.

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

#396
post #233

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.

That doesn't sound like something that has been extensively studied -- it's strange to me how Tesla keeps citing [0] miles driven by "vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware", as if it couldn't estimate the subset of miles in which Autopilot was activated -- and it seems like something very hard to measure anyway. How can Tesla or the driver know whether an accident was bound to happen if the accident was prevented?

However, I would think that testing Autopilot-alone seems impractical. It's been asserted that AP has no ability to react to or even detect stationary objects in front of it. Can't we assume that in all those cases, non-driver intervention would result in a crash?

[0] https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week%E2%80%99s-accide...

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

#397
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...

Here is where the Mountain View 85/101 crash occurred. Pictures taken this week: https://m.imgur.com/a/acAL8 More faded than the last StreetView pics. I also wonder if the line -- where the asphalt meets concrete -- contributed. Maybe it looked like the shoulder. Granted, there is also a yellow line.

Is it only Tesla's and Ubers that are crashing?

I havent heard of GM killing anyone with their car.

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

#398

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 tru…

my question which is the same as others, does Tesla register events where the driver overrides the system? If they register it how do they account for it?

if they are not even considering that the driver overrode the system because it was going to crash then all their claims are suspect.

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

#399
post #284
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Break the law? One surprising thing to me there is a ton of media attention on the SV right now (almost all negative) and that does not look like a coincidence. I disapprove of what FB is doing but on the scale of problems that Big Pharma, Health Insurance, big banks are causing thats not even a blip and yet most media attention and good amount of public outrage is fairly skillfully directed toward tech and SV.

> scale of problems that Big Pharma, Health Insurance, big banks are causing thats not even a blip and yet most media attention and good amount of public outrage is fairly skillfully directed toward tech and SV.

It really shouldn't surprise. "Big pharma continues shitty but legal business tactics," "Big banks continue to play games with people's money without significant oversight," and "American health care system overly expensive for poor outcomes marking continued national shame for leading nation" they're all old stories so there's not much new happening there. There's still lot of people angry out there about these things but there's nothing really new coming out so it doesn't get coverage. News is naturally biased against news that doesn't change, it just gets boring to most viewers.

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

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 worse than better, and at some point you're past the point of no return. I really hope it does get to the point were all drivers are automatic and interconnected. Cars could cooperate to a much higher ex…

"Hello, fellow robot car, I am also a robot car, not a wifi pineapple notatall nooosir, and all lanes ahead are blocked. But hey, there's a shortcut, just turn sharp to the right. Yes, your map says you're on a bridge, but don't worry, I have just driven through there, trust me." Nothing could possibly go wrong and the idea of evil actors in such a network is absurd - right? Your idea reminds me of the 1990s Internet…

There's no reason such a system would have to be engineered to be totally trusting. The car, in that situation, would likely be set up to say "nope, my sensors say that's not safe" and hand off to the driver or reject the input.

Use it just for additional input to err on the side of safety. If the car ahead says "hey, I'm braking at maximum" and my car's sensors show it's starting to slow down, I can apply more immediate braking power than if I'd just detected the initial slight slowdown.

Or, "I'm a car, don't hit me!" pings might help where my car thinks it's a radar artifact, like the Tesla crash last year where it hit the semi crossing the highway.

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