Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash • Hacker News Board

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#501

Post by username223 » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 2:11 AM UTC

slg wrote: post #132

txcwpalpha wrote: post #59

I used to be in awe of Teslas and I have always been a big fan of Musk, and even after the crash I still imagined myself one day buying a Tesla. But after this response, I've completely lost respect for the company, for Musk, and I don't think I'll ever buy one or advocate for someone buying one. The driver had previously reported to Tesla 7 to 10 times that there was an issue with autopilot, but Tesla told him "no t…

At the heart of this issue is the fact Teslas are the first car that can have its functionality changed drastically from day to day (this "drive into a median" bug is believed to be a recent issue introduced within the last few months of autopilot updates). I think that ability to update is one of the most exciting things about Teslas compared to other cars, but it presents a huge organizational problem. How does Tes…

> functionality changed drastically from day to day

Is this a daily thing? Weekly? Forced-updating software is almost always bad, but it would be a nightmare in my car. "Good morning! The buttons on your steering wheel have been remapped, and the auto-nav now has a different set of quirks. Have a nice day, and we are not liable!"

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#502

Post by unityByFreedom » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 2:11 AM UTC

imh wrote: post #116

It should be noted that the 40% crash reduction they keep quoting is done with an extremely simplistic analysis and is only a brief paragraph of the full report. https://www.scribd.com/embeds/337007075/content?start_page=1... It's not nearly as definitive as people (and Tesla) seem to claim it as. edit: The full analysis (from page 10 of the link): >5.4 Crash rates. ODI analyzed mileage and airbag deployment data sup…

Yup, there's a lawsuit trying to get the raw data behind the 40 percent number [1]. The original report [2] gives two averages, the crash rate per million miles driven before/after autosteer, 1.3 and 0.8. It doesn't say how many miles were driven, how many crashes, or when any of these occurred, so it's impossible to verify that result.

Further, the same NHTSA report notes that AEB reduces rear-end collisions by 40 percent. Supposedly, AEB and autosteer were enabled around the same time.

[1] http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/quality-control-...

[2] https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2016/INCLA-PE16007-7876.PDF

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#503

Post by kolpa » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 2:15 AM UTC

patcheudor wrote: post #107

tc wrote: post #18

Tesla probably shouldn't be saying anything about this at all, even just to avoid giving it more news cycles. But if they were going to say something, here's what they should have said the first time. ---- We take great care in building our cars to save lives. Forty thousands Americans die on the roads each year. That's a statistic. But even a single death of a Tesla driver or passenger is a tragedy. This has affecte…

>t's a tool to help attentive drivers avoid accidents that might have otherwise occurred. This needs far more discussion. I just don't buy it. I don't believe that you can have a car engaged in auto-drive mode and remain attentive. I think our psychology won't allow it. When driving, I find that I must be engaged and on long trips I don't even enable cruise control because taking the accelerator input away from me is…

The car should play "I spy" with you to keep you attentive to the road. You win if you spy a concrete barrier that the car doesn't.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#504

Post by unclebucknasty » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 2:16 AM UTC

patcheudor wrote: post #107

tc wrote: post #18

Tesla probably shouldn't be saying anything about this at all, even just to avoid giving it more news cycles. But if they were going to say something, here's what they should have said the first time. ---- We take great care in building our cars to save lives. Forty thousands Americans die on the roads each year. That's a statistic. But even a single death of a Tesla driver or passenger is a tragedy. This has affecte…

>t's a tool to help attentive drivers avoid accidents that might have otherwise occurred. This needs far more discussion. I just don't buy it. I don't believe that you can have a car engaged in auto-drive mode and remain attentive. I think our psychology won't allow it. When driving, I find that I must be engaged and on long trips I don't even enable cruise control because taking the accelerator input away from me is…

>I don't believe that you can have a car engaged in auto-drive mode and remain attentive

I've been saying this for a while and it's interesting to see more people evolve to this point of view. There was a time when this idea was unpopular here--owed mostly to people claiming that autonomous cars are still safer than humans, so the risks were acceptable. I think there are philosophical and moral reasons why this is not good enough, but that goes off-topic a bit.

In any case, some automakers have now embraced the Level-5 only approach and I sincerely believe that goal will not be achieved until either:

1. We achieve AGI or

2. Our roads are inspected and standards are set to certify them for autonomous vehicles (e.g. lane marking requirements, temporary construction changes, etc.)

Otherwise, I don't believe we can simply unleash autonomous vehicles on any road in any conditions and expect them to perform perfectly. I also believe it's impossible to test for every scenario. The recent dashcam videos have convinced me further of this [0].

The fact that there are "known-unknowns" in the absence of complete test-ability is one major reason that "better than humans" is not an ethical standard. We simply can't release vehicles to the open roads when we know there are any situations in which a human would outperform them in potentially life-saving ways.

[0] https://reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/8a0jfh/autopilot_b...

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#505

Post by kolpa » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 2:16 AM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #461

hyperbole wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one dies so someone 10 years from now can watch a full episode of the family guy unimpeded for the duration of their commute. The human toll is irrelevant to the conversation, what's relevant is whether risks taken are being taken knowingly - you cannot market a self driving vehicle whose functionality "is 2x better than any human being" while simultaneously stating in your legal language to protect yourself: don'…

Here is the messy situation: maybe this system is better at avoiding accidents than 40% of the people 99.999% of the time. The best thing is to build a system to analyze your driving and figure out if you are in that 40% of people and then let it drive for you. Maybe drunk drivers, for example. It can do this per ride: “oh you’re driving recklessly, do you want me to take over?” EVERYTHING ELSE SHOULD BE A STRICT IMP…

> The argument should NOT be about playing with people’s lives now so im the future some people can have a better system.

Why not? That's how pioneers make progress, in new aircraft and spacecraft.

If people want to be on the bleeding edge, why not let them?

How can the cars improve if they are never allowed to drive?

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#506

Post by kolpa » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 2:17 AM UTC

buvanshak wrote: post #490

kbutler wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about all those martyred by prolonging our current manual driving system for the years band decades it will take to roll out separate infrastructure for vehicles no one owns because they can't drive them anywhere? I think we need to keep the human driver in control, but have the computers learning through that constant, immediate feedback. And get rid of misleading marketing and fatal user experience design error…

>but have the computers learning through that constant, immediate feedback. I don't know what is stopping them from simulating everything inside a computer. Record the input from all the sensors when a car equipped sensors is driven through real roads by a human driver. Replay the sensor input, with enough random variations and let the algorithms train on it. Continue adding to the library of sensor data by making th…

>I don't know what is stopping them from simulating everything inside a computer.

Obviously they've already tried that, and it doesn't work. The map is not the territory.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#507

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 2:19 AM UTC

mozumder wrote: post #419

lopmotr wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What structural changes? Considering that self-driving cars are already running daily in many cities, those changes must be fairly minor since they've already been implemented in those cities.

You need those structural changes to make their fatality rates as small as regular cars. Right now self-driving cars aren't viable in the real-world due to their extremely high fatality rate, which are comparable to motorcycles. Meanwhile, there are several car models with ZERO fatalities.

[deleted]

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#508

Post by freerobby » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 2:21 AM UTC

unityByFreedom wrote: post #485

freerobby wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't footage of Autopilot. It's a development build of Full Self-Driving.

That's odd. It's the only video and topmost content on a page titled Autopilot.

Yeah, there's a very fair criticism around what exactly Tesla is advertising here.

As a safety matter, I am pretty confident that nobody gets through configuration and delivery (let alone a test drive) thinking this is what their car does when they turn on Autopilot.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#509

Post by Splines » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 2:29 AM UTC

tedivm wrote: post #436

osrec wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your initial sentiment. In my opinion, we can have self driving cars without a large human toll. I just think we need to stop trying to merge self driving cars into a road system designed for human operators. Moreover, we should not be "beta testing" our self driving cars on roads with human operators. Accidents will happen, as ML models can and do go unstable from time to time. Instead, we should loo…

To me beta testing should be a long period of time where the computer is running while humans are driving, with deviations between what the computer would do if it had control versus what the human actually does being recorded for future training. The value add is that the computer can still be used to alert to dangerous conditions, or potentially even overriding in certain circumstances (applying break when lidar se…

It's surprising that this isn't the standard right now. I'm certain the people at Tesla/Uber/Waymo have considered this - I'm curious why this approach isn't more common.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#510

Post by Xylakant » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 2:33 AM UTC

kolpa wrote: post #505

EGreg wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the messy situation: maybe this system is better at avoiding accidents than 40% of the people 99.999% of the time. The best thing is to build a system to analyze your driving and figure out if you are in that 40% of people and then let it drive for you. Maybe drunk drivers, for example. It can do this per ride: “oh you’re driving recklessly, do you want me to take over?” EVERYTHING ELSE SHOULD BE A STRICT IMP…

> The argument should NOT be about playing with people’s lives now so im the future some people can have a better system. Why not? That's how pioneers make progress, in new aircraft and spacecraft. If people want to be on the bleeding edge, why not let them? How can the cars improve if they are never allowed to drive?

Pioneers usually are people well aware that what they’re doing is risky. I doubt that the victims of the last Tesla crashes and of the latest Uber crash regarded themselves as Pioneers. They probably just wanted to safely arrive at their destination and relied on a feature marketed as being capable to bring them there.

The pioneers in this case are putting other people’s life at risk.

Wayne seems to demonstrate that improving self-driving cars without leaving a trail of bodies behind seems in the realm of possibility, so let’s measure Tesla against that standard.