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

#441

Post by wilun » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 3:11 PM UTC

mannykannot wrote: post #314

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…

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…

You can add safety automated features without requiring completely insane and dangerous mode of operations (like pretending the car can drive itself except that it can not and pretending that you did not pretend in the first place and reminding that the driver should have its hand on the wheel and be alert and what is even the point then?????)

They could be more useful with -- for now -- less features. They probably won't do it because they want some sacrificial beta testers to collect some more data for their marginally less crappy next version. But given the car does not even have the necessary hardware to become a real self driving car (and that some analysts even think Tesla is gonna close soon) the people taking the risks of being sacrificed will probably not even reap the benefits of the risks they have taken, paying enormous amount of money to effectively work for that company (among other things).

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

#442

Post by matte_black » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 3:14 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #420

matte_black wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that conclusion completely ignores the fact that the kind of people who buy Teslas are generally not the kind of people who drive unsafely anyway and die in terrible wrecks. If you give every shitty driver a self driving Tesla maybe you would do something to make roads safer, but if you’re just giving it to higher net worth individuals who place greater value on their own life, you haven’t even made a dent in tra…

Seems like your first two paragraphs are amenable to analysis. Surely there is data out there that splits traffic accident statistics on income, or some proxy for income. Is a Tesla on autopilot more accident-prone than a BMW or Lexus? The numbers as they stand certainly seem to imply "no", but I'd be willing to read a paper. The third paragraph though is just you flinging opinion around. You assert without evidence…

Drunk drivers, recklessly fast drivers, redlight runners, stop sign blowers, high speed tailgaters... those are the demographic you have to compare the Tesla drivers to. Do people who buy Teslas engage in those kinds of dangerous activities?

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

#443

Post by ChuckMcM » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 3:17 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #204

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…

"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%.

I expect it is the nature of the problem. Autopilot fails when the road conditions are such that it cannot function correctly. Imagine that you drive your commute from point A to point B and use autopilot all the time and it has never failed you. Then you use it when driving from point A to point C and because there are road conditions on that route that it cannot handle it tries to drive you into a ditch. Your experience may be giving you more confidence in its ability than it deserves. This is made worse when it has worked fine from point A to point B until one day a painter had a bad day and one of the cans of paint they forgot to secure fell off the back of their truck and put a big diagonal splash on the lane. And on that day your autopilot drives you into the car next to you.

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

#444

Post by WhompingWindows » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 3:17 PM UTC

awakeasleep wrote: post #430

paul7986 wrote: post #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.

Aren't we all the crash test dummies if we're sharing the road with them?

We are nothing like crash test dummies. Crash test dummies are intentionally slammed into barriers at 60+ mph.

Testing of vehicle safety features, and safety features of many products, is most often done in mass markets. Automatic safety features are being rolled out in essentially every single auto brand. Automatic emergency braking (AEB) is set to be standard in numerous makes in a couple years. Lane control, lane reminders, blindspot detectors, these features are all being rolled out on the roads, to varying degrees of success.

This is a less-safe version of the way drugs are brought to market. First, small-scale tests with cells only, then mice, then healthy people, then target patients, and finally post-market surveillance.

Cars indeed have a MUCH less regulated rollout for their safety features, yet to say we are dummies in their tests is not even close to reality. While drug testing may be more stringent, we also don't have 30-40k people a year dying from "not taking a drug" accidents, which is the situation on our roads today.

Ultimately, it comes down to lives saved. Every time you delay a safety feature, you have to ask the question: is this delay going to lead to loss of life or saving a life? That's the moral quandary the automakers are in, and it seems they go with "release it" much more often than not. That will lead to some EXTREMELY well publicized accidents, and yet we will NOT hear of the countless cases where everything went nominally, and who's to say precisely how many accidents were prevented?

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

#445

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 3:19 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #380

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…

> 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…

Ethics works by consensus. If the majority of the public become convinced that they prefer to die as a result of their choices than as a result of the choices of a machine they have no control over, even if the machine kills less often, then the machine is not an ethical choice anymore. Basically, forcing people to die in one specific way stinks to high heaven.

As to why we use certain technologies, that is not so clear cut either. For instance, if I have a heart attack and someone uses a defibrilator on me- at that time, that is not necessarily my choice. I'm incapacitated and can't communicate and if I die at the end there's no way to know what I would have chosen.

Not to mention- most people are not anywhere nearly informed enough to decide what technology should be used to save or protect their lives (for instance, that's why we have vaccine deniers etc).

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

#446

Post by Balero » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 3:19 PM UTC

tikkabhuna wrote: post #395

wastedhours wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Growing up driving in country roads in the UK you learn some tricks (dumb tricks you shouldn't do). One example is at night time you can take corners more quickly by driving on the wrong side of the road. If you can't see another cars headlights, then there are none coming.

The thought of doing this now scares me and I don't do this and suggest that no one else does either. But I know many people still drive like this.

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

#447

Post by jonknee » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 3:20 PM UTC

dannyw wrote: post #408

I want to ask: why is Tesla's advanced suite of cameras and ultrasonic sensors unable to detect a big, yellow and black stationary barrier? In combination with chevron markings that mean "never ever drive here". Either should be a globally overriding signal to emergency break or turn, not "keep following the white line". If the answer is "during morning light, it doesn't see it", then they need to take the feature of…

I've seen a lot of Tesla apologizers talk about how it's such a bad design, but people seem to be able to dodge it successfully and so should Autopilot. It seems like this feature should require hands on the wheel until it has enough training data that it doesn't do things like smash you into an obvious obstacle in whatever lighting conditions are possible at any time.

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

#448

Post by ghaff » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 3:20 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #126

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…

> 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 fatalities could be avoided. Your opinion will be irrelevant--the insurance companies get the final say. When that safety point arrives, your insurance rates will change to make manual driving unaffor…

>your insurance rates will change to make manual driving unaffordable

I see people saying that. Why would insurance be more expensive than today--implying that manual driving becomes more dangerous once self-driving cars become common? It's already a common pattern that assistive safety (and anti-theft) systems tend to carry an insurance discount versus not having them.

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

#449

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 3:23 PM UTC

matte_black wrote: post #442

ajross wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like your first two paragraphs are amenable to analysis. Surely there is data out there that splits traffic accident statistics on income, or some proxy for income. Is a Tesla on autopilot more accident-prone than a BMW or Lexus? The numbers as they stand certainly seem to imply "no", but I'd be willing to read a paper. The third paragraph though is just you flinging opinion around. You assert without evidence…

Drunk drivers, recklessly fast drivers, redlight runners, stop sign blowers, high speed tailgaters... those are the demographic you have to compare the Tesla drivers to. Do people who buy Teslas engage in those kinds of dangerous activities?

There was a recent news item about a Tesla driver who fell asleep at the wheel and who was allegedly over the legal limit:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tesla+driver+drunk+asleep&t=ffsb&a...

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

#450

Post by jonknee » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 3:23 PM UTC

quotemstr wrote: post #403

ldesegur wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The low sunlight is hard to deal with by humans and computer vision isn't better. In the meantime, Tesla's CEO doesn't believe Lidar is necessary ( https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/7/16988628/elon-musk-lidar-s... ). My advice to the company BOD & shareholders: have him take the Udacity's self driving car online course and after the first project, he'll clearly understand how limited detecting lanes by CV only can be.…

Musk's central point is that if humans can drive with two cameras, so can a machine. And he's right . Why wouldn't we do just as well as the visual cortex?

But isn't the whole point of autonomous cars that humans are pretty shitty drivers? If I could augment my vision with a 360º setup of cameras and LIDAR you better believe I would!