Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 488 posts

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#61

Post by dmitrygr »

Good reading: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-...

Basically this is a well-known issue in aviation. As automation gets better and better, humans rely on it more and more and get less and less able to handle even minute failures in it. Additionally humans are absolutely terrible at being able to be dropped into a complex situation and have to make immediate rational decisions about it - thus the failure mode of "in case of error, tell human to handle it" is a bad idea if time between "tell human about it" and "crash into things" is under ten seconds or so. This has been the subject of many NASA studies and NTSB reports and the above article does a good job presenting this info in a form a layman can understand.

There are currently no known easy solutions, sadly.

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#62

Post by dirkgently »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #14
olliej wrote: post #6

I really wish all the car manufacturers would stop with this bullshit "you still have to be driving it" self driving nonsense. Claiming that the driver is still responsible for driving the car, while using a system designed to encourage the "driver" to not pay attention is a dumb idea, and all I can see is this kind of thing leading to regulations the delay actual self driving cars. I'm not a self-driving car fanboy…

Blame Elon Musk. I'm serious. He's been promising "self-driving" for years, except the damn technology isn't ready/safe enough for what people are clearly using this from. The manufacturer puts a warning label, but the usage model/UI is clearly flawed. His engineers know this, which is why Tesla's self-driving group has had such a high turnover rate over the last few years. Musk keeps overriding them.

Tesla's "Auto-pilot" is one of the most blatant market-speak lies I have come across lately, and they have been getting away it.

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#63

Post by lph »

How does Tesla fail so badly at basic collision avoidance?? Surely the LIDAR is able to detect an imminent collision, but at least in the recent fire truck and lane-split barrier incidents, the cars didn't even slow down?! That seems really fundamental.

Edit: so they don't use lidar... Is this a machine vision failure, then?

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#64

Post by King-Aaron »

foobar1962 wrote: post #13
olliej wrote: post #6

I really wish all the car manufacturers would stop with this bullshit "you still have to be driving it" self driving nonsense. Claiming that the driver is still responsible for driving the car, while using a system designed to encourage the "driver" to not pay attention is a dumb idea, and all I can see is this kind of thing leading to regulations the delay actual self driving cars. I'm not a self-driving car fanboy…

>I'm not a self-driving car fanboy or anything. I don't think it's just around the corner, but it's clearly going to happen /eventually/ ... Self driving vehicles have been used at Rio Tinto's Pilbara mine for a couple of years. Sure, it's on private land and the complexity of the task is far smaller than for public roads, but it's happening now. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-worlds...

> Self driving vehicles have been used at Rio Tinto's Pilbara mine for a couple of years.

Accidents still happen up there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WZCweaakOg

(*video may not explicitly of an autonomous truck, I'm not entirely sure, but just using it as an illustration)

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#65

Post by rdiddly »

olliej wrote: post #6

I really wish all the car manufacturers would stop with this bullshit "you still have to be driving it" self driving nonsense. Claiming that the driver is still responsible for driving the car, while using a system designed to encourage the "driver" to not pay attention is a dumb idea, and all I can see is this kind of thing leading to regulations the delay actual self driving cars. I'm not a self-driving car fanboy…

Don't you see? When it's time to buy the car, it's self-driving. When it's time to take responsibility for avoiding obstacles, you're the one driving.

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#66

Post by wmf »

iamgopal wrote: post #60

Why they not partner with Google? I think they have much better talent pool at AI to handle this. I hope they are using all the crash data to make it more robust.

Because Google/Waymo is using lidar which adds ~$150K to the cost of the car.

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#67

Post by jonknee »

hndamien wrote: post #55
jonknee wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow it super closely but there is exactly 1 car manufacture that I can think of guilty of pushing the self driving myth. The established car makers seem to market it as an assist, not as an autopilot. Tesla is the outlier, everyone else is much more conservative.

Auto pilot != Self driving. People love to conflate these two so much that the people saying it rely on everybody else conflating it to justify their ignorance. This is just like Fox "some people say" - Fox people say! Or Javascript Bitcoin miners - Monero is not Bitcoin! It's snowing so there is no global warming - It is "climate change" but the entire globe is warming! This hurricane is just weather, not climate ch…

Well then maybe they shouldn't call it auto pilot? I mean, how dumb of a name could they have chosen if they didn't want people to think the car can drive itself?

They should also retrain their sales staff because on my test drive the saleswoman specifically told me the car could drive itself and that I should take my hands off the wheel to test it out.

They should also retrain their CEO who keeps talking about "self driving" in reference to existing cars:

https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...

> "All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware"

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#68

Post by abdelm »

hndamien wrote: post #55
jonknee wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow it super closely but there is exactly 1 car manufacture that I can think of guilty of pushing the self driving myth. The established car makers seem to market it as an assist, not as an autopilot. Tesla is the outlier, everyone else is much more conservative.

Auto pilot != Self driving. People love to conflate these two so much that the people saying it rely on everybody else conflating it to justify their ignorance. This is just like Fox "some people say" - Fox people say! Or Javascript Bitcoin miners - Monero is not Bitcoin! It's snowing so there is no global warming - It is "climate change" but the entire globe is warming! This hurricane is just weather, not climate ch…

https://www.tesla.com/autopilot/ -> big text saying "Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars" + video showcasing said capability.

You have to go way down to "Enhanced Autopilot" section to read the smaller text that mentions that its subject to regulatory approval, and that the driver is responsible.

If you don't think that's misleading advertising, I don't know what is.

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#69

Post by King-Aaron »

Schwolop wrote: post #59
foobar1962 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not a self-driving car fanboy or anything. I don't think it's just around the corner, but it's clearly going to happen /eventually/ ... Self driving vehicles have been used at Rio Tinto's Pilbara mine for a couple of years. Sure, it's on private land and the complexity of the task is far smaller than for public roads, but it's happening now. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-worlds...

I wrote the initial interface specification for the co-ordination system in Rio's open-pit mines. The mere fact that we were able to account for the state of every moving thing in the pit makes this a completely different proposition to self-driving vehicles in an uncontrolled real-world environment. At a guess it's at least ten to a hundred times easier.

Eventually this could be put into place in the broader traffic ecosystem - if all the cars on the road were required to have a transponder sort of arrangement on board, you could have a central point of control, and perhaps tie in people's phones etc to locate pedestrians. I do want to note that I am aware that there is an unfathomably large amount of complexity behind that however.

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#70

Post by dirkgently »

smnrchrds wrote: post #52
olliej wrote: post #6

I really wish all the car manufacturers would stop with this bullshit "you still have to be driving it" self driving nonsense. Claiming that the driver is still responsible for driving the car, while using a system designed to encourage the "driver" to not pay attention is a dumb idea, and all I can see is this kind of thing leading to regulations the delay actual self driving cars. I'm not a self-driving car fanboy…

We have seen time and time again that if corporations can wash their hands off of something, they do so. For the past few decades, and perhaps for much longer, the operating principle of corporations have been "if it's not illegal, it's moral." As an example, rationally speaking credit bureaus and financial institutions are 100% responsible if they give someone a loan or open an account for them under your name. But…

> If the laws allow companies to sell Level 5 autonomous vehicle while keeping the passenger (because it's not really a driver anymore) responsible

Well, law is allowing Tesla to sell a Level 1 vehicle as Level 5. They have to start applying false advertisement laws first before they can think about other laws.

Post reply on HN