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Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

latimes.com

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

#251

Post by Someone1234 »

hndamien wrote: post #247
Someone1234 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the car crashing into the parked police car, a parked fire engine, decapitated, and driving straight into a road divider at full speed were better proof that people are mislead by the term "autopilot." Tesla likes to play both sides, it is "autopilot" when it works, but when it doesn't then the driver has literally under six seconds (according to Tesla) to avert a fatal accident.

No, it is always autopilot, you must pay attention and it never is or has been fully self driving.

Honestly the whole system is in the "uncanny valley." It is just effective enough to leave people with a false sense of security but just buggy enough to continue to kill people.

Any system that randomly needs a massive correction in under six seconds between potentially several minutes of inaction is too dangerous to be used on public roads.

I didn't sign Tesla's little disclaimer, I shouldn't have to share roads with people beta testing dangerous software.

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

#252

Post by rubidium »

dingo_bat wrote: post #250

To successfully develop self-driving cars, without spending NASA moon mission like time and money, we need to put a value on a human life. Maybe even different values for passenger, driver, pedestrian, other motorists, policemen, etc. Then the risk, time, and money to spend will be easily defined. If some task will take a software engineer (paid $150k/year) half year to develop but only increase safety enough to save…

Your guess at numbers, even though made up, have a concerning low regard for human life.

Since they're required to, the us dept of transportation puts it at just over 6 million.

Priceless is of course the right answer, but engineering wise you're in the 5-10 million range.

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

#253

Post by wooter »

TeeWEE wrote: post #230
eanzenberg wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pure arrogance. In the model 3 when you are in autopilot they have video games and memes to play/watch on the giant screen. How does this pass regulation and is allowed to be sold? Building products to actively distract an operator of a 2 ton vehicle moving 60 mph?

This is actually true. it baffled me too. For proof, check this review video by Top Gear. They demo the Easter eggs that are only available in AutoPilot mode; https://youtu.be/1GrNv3ow9H8

calling it video games and memes is extremely disingenuous. it replaces icons

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

#254

Post by King-Aaron »

brett40324 wrote: post #203
King-Aaron wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And when software on a car assumes pedestrians always have a mobile device on their person, charged and ready for a split second alert? IMO This would be an absurd design.

It'd be a tool in the toolkit, in my hypothetical. I mean, by the time autonomous cars were common enough on the road, we might all be tagged with an rfid chip as a normal identification or something... I don't disagree that it's an absurd idea, but it's just a devils advocate position I'm discussing here.

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

#255

Post by Bedon292 »

abalone wrote: post #102

I keep wondering what the customer benefit of Level 2 autopilot is if not to lower your attention and relax your mind. Tesla's "out" is that drivers are supposed to retain full attention and oversight of the autopilot system -- but then if you strictly follow this rule, what is the benefit of autopilot? I can see the benefit to Tesla and future Tesla customers of essentially crowdsourced fleet learning. But what is t…

The freeing of the physical part is really the benefit for me. My knees are bad, and sitting in stop and go traffic, or even long traffic lights can actually be painful. Its not bad, but it gets really annoying. Being able to physically move my leg is amazing. You probably do get a lot of that with just adaptive cruise control these days as well, but no real experience with that. The mental load is still identical, but the physical part is way more relaxed.

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

#256

Post by flyGuyOnTheSly »

My sinister side is tingling...

How convenient for non-autopilot auto manufacturers... to have a competitor out there boasting semi-autopilot capabilities...

I wonder how many of these "autopilot crashes" could be machinations... if not already, then in the future perhaps?

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

#257

Post by cm2012 »

flyGuyOnTheSly wrote: post #256

My sinister side is tingling... How convenient for non-autopilot auto manufacturers... to have a competitor out there boasting semi-autopilot capabilities... I wonder how many of these "autopilot crashes" could be machinations... if not already, then in the future perhaps?

Or, the incredibly more likely and predicted option is that you shouldn't promote a self driving car that requires constant attention from the driver. Comments on every HN thread have literally warned about this for years.

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

#258

Post by true_religion »

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 agree, they should publicly distance themselves from the self-driving monicker until they at least reach level 4 coverage. At level 3, this should be at best described as 'driver assistance', or maybe a more descriptive but less palatable marketing term could be 'training wheels'---you still have to drive, but if you take your eyes off the road you might not die immediately like in a 'real' car.

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

#259

Post by ajross »

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.

> except the damn technology isn't ready/safe enough for what people are clearly using this from

Outrageously false. These incidents are so rare that they have whole news stories written about every single one. How many crashes were there in Laguna Beach yesterday?

Tesla accident rates in aggregate are quite good. Under autopilot the data is noisy but still underneath the level of an average car (not as low as luxury vehicles in the same price range, though).

Claiming that it "isn't ready" is innumerate nonsense. It could clearly be better, sure. So could you. And no one is demanding to revoke your license, because you aren't a scary AI.

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

#260

Post by jcranmer »

admyral wrote: post #236
foolfoolz wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tell this to the families of the people who have died

We don't yet have evidence that Tesla's using Autopilot are any less safe than human drivers. We do have plenty of examples of traditional auto makers negligently ignoring safety regulations, manufacturing faulty vehicles and also causing fatalities. But somehow we don't hear the same pleas for sympathy for those souls.

We don't yet have any evidence that Teslas using Autopilot are any safer than human drivers. We do have plenty of evidence suggesting that humans are unable to pay proper attention when asked to do tasks like driving a level 3 automation of cars. There is plenty of reason to believe that this going to cause an increase in accidents, particularly of the fatal variety (say, running over a pedestrian at lethal speed).
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