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

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

#711

Post by omarforgotpwd » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 8:31 AM UTC

astrodust wrote: post #709

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try it. it’s not impossible. I do it all the time. Have you ever noticed how passengers are still paying attention to what’s going on and sometimes even turn their head to see where the car is turning? it’s like that, except you’re in the drivers seat. it’s not more work than driving.

That crash in the video is one you'd have very little time to avoid. Recognizing that the car isn't just going a bit wide but is on a direct collision course with the barrier takes time, and then you need to determine a course of action, reacting without over-reacting. You probably have 100ms to begin your action, 500ms to complete it. Good luck with that if you're not perfectly alert.

Trust me, when the car starts doing something you wouldn't do you feel it immediately IF you're paying attention. Remember the car doesn't do anything fancy -- it's just supposed to drive straight centered in the lane

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

#712

Post by NLips » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 8:33 AM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #673

anyzen wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that it's not (only) about colors... Human vision has trouble picking out colors in the dark, yet it still allows us to process world around us to a surprising degree. However until the "brain" of the car is good enough, it is simply irresponsible of Tesla not to use all the data available, from as many different sensors as possible. Testa should use color. And they should use Lidar.

on human eyes, I was under the impression that we had a much better dynamic range than the best cameras on the market.

My understanding is that the eye doesn't have a great dynamic range, but our brain tricks us (as with a lot of vision). When looking at dark things, we can't make out bright detail and vice versa. As soon as you look at a bright area to make out detail, the eye adjusts, just like a camera.

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

#713

Post by tnegoshi » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 8:40 AM UTC

slg wrote: post #424

danso wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are reading into that text more than you should. The page's title is "Autopilot | Tesla". It is the first result for "tesla autopilot" in search results. And "autopilot" appears 9 times on the page. So if that's not an intentional attempt to mislead consumers into conflating Autopilot with "full self-driving", then what would such an attempt look like, hypothetically?

Is it crazy to hold a driver to a higher standard than simply Googling "Tesla autopilot" and only reading the first paragraph of the first result? If you read that entire page, the difference between autopilot and full self-driving is clear. If you read the car's manual, the difference is clear. If you look at the configurator for the car, the difference is clear when you have to pay $3,000 extra for full self-drivin…

> Is it crazy to hold a driver to a higher standard than simply Googling "Tesla autopilot" and only reading the first paragraph of the first result?

For this standard it would have to apply to every driver. Should drivers who do not google "Tesla autopilot", let alone ones that do and read on in a section about said autopilot feature, be punished with death in a two ton metal trap?

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

#714

Post by _ph_ » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 8:41 AM UTC

abalone wrote: post #626

Tesla is recklessly using its own customers to train their fleet for level 5. AT BEST their response is, drivers need to be 100% as attentive as they would without autopilot. What then is the point of autopilot, except to train the fleet? They are in complete denial that autosteering can seduce reasonable people into lowering their guard and mentally relaxing. Again, what other immediate user benefit would it provide…

The training function is independant on autopilot being active on the car. The training happens during any drive, if the Tesla owner did opt into sharing the driving data. Actually it even happens on cars which don't have autopilot, as all Tesla cars are manufactured with the hardware. You buy the autopilot function just as a software feature.

And in the car menu, "autopilot" is actually called "autosteering" as a feature to activate. And overall it is just a very fancy cruise control, which is able to keep the proper distance to cars in front of you and keep inside your lane.

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

#715

Post by VBprogrammer » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 8:42 AM UTC

culturestate wrote: post #688

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what it's commonly called currently. Not super weird if you consider that there is an autopilot on planes - which only keeps direction and altitude. You also have to keep en eye on it and of course steer it to where you want it to go.

Autopilot on a modern commercial aircraft does much more than hold heading and altitude. It's quite possible for autopilot to fly the plane autonomously almost entirely from takeoff to landing.

Autopilots on aircraft are remarkably dumb in comparison to even the simplest forms of self driving. They are quite capable of flying an aircraft into the side of a mountain if that is what the pilot selects.

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

#716

Post by Cthulhu_ » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 8:44 AM UTC

skgoa wrote: post #693

Animats wrote: post #552

Tesla's system demands more from drivers than manual driving. The driver has to detect automation failures after they occur, but before a crash. This requires faster reaction time than merely avoiding obstacles. Here's a good example - a Tesla on autopilot crashing into a temporary road barrier which required a lane change.[1] This is a view from the dashcam of the vehicle behind the Tesla. At 00:21, things look norm…

> This is why, as the head of Google's self driving effort once said, partial self driving "assistance" is inherently unsafe. Sorry, but this is the exact wrong conclusion to make from the available data. Partially automated cars have been driven by average people on the public roads since 2006, when the Mercedes S class got active steering and ACC. There is no data that says that these systems, which are available o…

I don't think it's a problem specific to Tesla; the main difference is that Tesla's system instills a lot more confidence in drivers than tools like lane assist and adaptive cruise control (source: I have those; I don't trust them). It's a marketing and user experience problem; marketing because Tesla still insists on calling it autopilot, and user experience because it works pretty good most of the time - in normal conditions. It fails when there's a truck crossing the road or when it's confused by roadworks. The lane assist in my car also gets confused at roadworks, but it's much more likely to turn off and will start yelling at me with annoying tones within seconds of not detecting any steering input.

Tesla can easily fix this - disable autopilot if the user does not have his hands on the wheel. Disable autopilot at construction zones. Disable autopilot sooner when confidence level is lowered.

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

#717

Post by astrodust » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 8:46 AM UTC

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #711

astrodust wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That crash in the video is one you'd have very little time to avoid. Recognizing that the car isn't just going a bit wide but is on a direct collision course with the barrier takes time, and then you need to determine a course of action, reacting without over-reacting. You probably have 100ms to begin your action, 500ms to complete it. Good luck with that if you're not perfectly alert.

Trust me, when the car starts doing something you wouldn't do you feel it immediately IF you're paying attention. Remember the car doesn't do anything fancy -- it's just supposed to drive straight centered in the lane

It drove in a straight line right into the wall. What part of that, other than hitting the wall, are you going to "feel"?

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

#718

Post by sjwright » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 8:48 AM UTC

kgwgk wrote: post #629

tjomk wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the point why I will never understand people in US and the sort of thing with labels and warnings. You don't microwave a cat just because there is no warning label saying you cannot do that. You do not dry your hair submerged in a bath just because there's no warning label. And knowing how imperfect and faulty this system is (which is what the family says the driver told them), I would avoid engaging…

> You don't microwave a cat just because there is no warning label saying you cannot do that. And why don’t you that, precisely? If you don’t understand the physics of the thing how are you supossed to know that using it on low power is different that bathing the cat on warm water, for example?

If you are a mentally functioning adult and you don't instinctively know not to put a cat in the microwave, society has failed you. This isn't a case of special knowledge about how microwaves work, it's just basic safety knowledge like the dangers of sharp knives.

The rest of the world seems to get by okay here.

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

#719

Post by avar » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 8:54 AM UTC

claudius wrote: post #706

avar wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Is there any evidence that this is the case? >Yes. If there is evidence for it, this isn't it. Tesla cars having higher claim frequencies compared to say the puny Fiat 500 Electric (noted in the article) could just as well be explained by people driving it dangerously because it has "Ludicrous Mode". Porsche also has 3x the accident rate of Daewoo. That doesn't mean Daewoo cars are 3x as safe, it just means that pe…

> If there is evidence for it, this isn't it. Tesla cars having higher claim frequencies compared to say the puny Fiat 500 Electric (noted in the article) could just as well be explained by people driving it dangerously because it has "Ludicrous Mode". This is not the claim in the linked article. The linked article claims that Tesla cars have a higher claim frequency than comparable gasoline-powered cars (i.e. large…

This thread started off with the GP comment by crabasa saying "Wouldn't Tesla vehicles have a higher rate of crashes [if Autopilot was so dangerous], all things being equal?".

I'm pointing out that all other things aren't equal, and you can't assume from overall crash data that you can tease out statistics about how safe a specific feature of the car is.

The comparison to the Fiat 500 is relevant because while the report didn't only compare Tesla vehicles to it, that's one of the comparisons.

Is a Tesla less safe than a Fiat 500 given that it's driven by the same sorts of drivers, in similar conditions and just as carefully as a Fiat 500? Maybe, but who knows? We don't have that data, since there's an up-front selection bias when you buy a high-performance luxury car.

I wasn't able to find the raw report mentioned in this article, but here's a similar older report they've published:

http://www.iihs.org/media/2648a3bc-0c73-4036-ae00-a53a399a18...

There you can see that the claim frequency of Tesla is indeed a bit higher than all other cars they're compared to, but this doesn't hold when adjusted for claim severity or overall losses. There cars like the BMW M6 and the Audi RS7 pull ahead of Tesla by far.

So at the very least you'd have to be making the claim that even if this data somehow showed how badly performing Autopilot was, that it was mainly causing things like minor scratches, not severe damage such as crashing into a freeway divider.

Just looking at these numbers there seems, to me anyway, to be a much stronger correlation between lack of safety and whether the buyer is a rich guy undergoing a mid-life crisis than any sort of Autopilot feature.

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

#720

Post by brain_dev » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 8:56 AM UTC

thebluehawk wrote: post #274

matt2000 wrote: post #15

The thing that sometimes gets lost in the debate around Tesla autopilot (IMO), is that it's possible for self driving cars to be theoretically better than human drivers, AND that Tesla's implementation of that concept to be overall worse. From the recent accidents it seems clear that Tesla autopilot is just not that great in it's current form. Even if it's following a line that it mistakes for a lane marker, how is i…

Autopilot is not an implementation of self-driving cars... You have a completely wrong understanding of this system. It's basically cruise control that has some lane keeping abilities. If you put your (non-TACC) car in cruise control on the freeway and then ignored everything around you, you will rear end someone, and it's not cruise controls fault. If you put a lane-keeping assist car (like Tesla or others) and comp…

> It's basically cruise control that has some lane keeping abilities.

And this is exactly why calling it Autopilot is immoral and dangerous.