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NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

arstechnica.com

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Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#111

Post by drag0nballz »

nlawalker wrote: post #50
Animats wrote: post #42

NTSB: • At 8 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was following a lead vehicle and was traveling about 65 mph. • At 7 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla began a left steering movement while following a lead vehicle. • At 4 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was no longer following a lead vehicle. • At 3 seconds prior to the crash and up to the time of impact with the crash attenuator, the Tesla’s speed increas…

>> These vehicles will run into stationary obstacles at full speed with no warning or emergency braking at all. That is by design. This is not an implementation bug or sensor failure. A little off topic, but I'm curious: I usually use "by design" to mean "an intentional result." How do other people use the term? In this case, the behavior is a result of the design (as opposed to the implementation), but is surely not…

I think this is proper usage of "by design". The design part is that it uses a camera and low resolution radar and can see lanes and other cars and not obstacles. So this is an unintended edge case but the result is per the design.

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#112

Post by falcolas »

mymacbook wrote: post #27

Reading that initial report is terrifying. I am so glad the NTSB set the record straight that the driver had his hands on the wheel for the majority of the final minute of travel. Really makes me feel like Tesla was out to blame the driver from the get go. To be clear the driver is absolutely partially at fault, but my goodness autopilot sped up into the barrier in the final seconds — totally unexpected when the car…

> To be clear the driver is absolutely partially at fault

I'm... not so certain. Why? The autopilot had likely exhibited proper behavior every time that the vehicle had passed that particular section of road prior, and if the driver was paying full attention to the behavior of the vehicle, he would only notice the problem around the 5 second mark.

Five seconds, if you have no reason to be concerned about the vehicle's behavior, is not much time - especially if you consider that alert drivers are recommended to give themselves a minimum of 4 seconds of reaction time (i.e. follow a vehicle by at least 4 seconds).

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#113

Post by dragontamer »

MBCook wrote: post #87
stetrain wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gore zone did not have a striped area, just solid lines on each side. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5582461/Tesla... Edit: Google street view of the location: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.410912,-122.0757037,3a,75y,2...

Ah. I wonder if they do recognize the stripes then. BTW does anyone know why it’s called a ‘gore’ zone? I can see it being a (brutal) nickname but I’m hoping there is some better reason.

It seems like its a brutal nickname. The "Gore" zone seems to refer to the area after the emergency-cushion is damaged.

Normally, that area has a barrier designed to save lives, by slowing down cars and providing cushioning. However, the emergency-cushion was already damaged from a prior crash.

Without an emergency-cushion, running into a straight concrete barrier has known, lethal consequences.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm just guessing.

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#114

Post by jakelarkin »

pipio21 wrote: post #93
jakelarkin wrote: post #14

self driving systems cant well reason about untrained scenarios or the intent of other humans on the road. I think the people have grossly underestimated how driving in an uncontrolled environment is really a general AI problem, which we're not even close to solving.

You don't need reason, you need fast reaction times slowing the car and avoiding obstacles. The same happens with humans. Reason is extremely slow. Pilots are trained to act fast training the subconscious, not the logical mind.

normal driving requires anticipating the behavior of other humans who may or may not entire your path of travel or anticipating unseen obstacles. it has less to do with "reaction times" than one would think. Humans routinely over-drive their vehicles capability to safely stop for an obstacle in front or adjacent to their path of travel.

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#115

Post by wjamesg »

zo1 wrote: post #105
raldi wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The paint on the right edge of the gore marking, as seen in Google Maps, is worn Indeed; here's a close-up of the critical area. Note that the darker stripe on the bottom of the photo is NOT the crucial one; the one that the car was supposed to follow is the much more faded one above that that you can barely see: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.410912,-122.0757037,3a,75y,2... (Note that I'm not blaming the faded pa…

Wow. The start of that concrete lane-divider looks incredibly dangerous for a highway. It pretty-much just "starts", with only some sort of object that they call a "crash attenuator" in front of it. I would imagine its purpose is to dampen/dissipate kinetic energy and maybe deflect oncoming objects from hitting the concrete slab directly. I don't even see any sort of road-bumps to warn drivers of this dangerous obsta…

Agree. The area leading up to the barrier could at least be striped off.

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#116

Post by mmusson »

Animats wrote: post #42

NTSB: • At 8 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was following a lead vehicle and was traveling about 65 mph. • At 7 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla began a left steering movement while following a lead vehicle. • At 4 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was no longer following a lead vehicle. • At 3 seconds prior to the crash and up to the time of impact with the crash attenuator, the Tesla’s speed increas…

I wonder how soon radar reflecting paints will start being used on roadways and barriers, etc. That seems like it would be a general benefit to all brands of cars with auto drive.

At the end of the day we want to know if the autonomous systems are safe. Policy decisions will end up depending on that determination. That requires clear definitions for what constitutes failures and accurate gathering of data.

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#117

Post by txcwpalpha »

falcolas wrote: post #97
Animats wrote: post #42

NTSB: • At 8 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was following a lead vehicle and was traveling about 65 mph. • At 7 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla began a left steering movement while following a lead vehicle. • At 4 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was no longer following a lead vehicle. • At 3 seconds prior to the crash and up to the time of impact with the crash attenuator, the Tesla’s speed increas…

One more thing to note - anecdotal evidence indicates that Tesla cars did not attempt to center within a lane prior to an OTA update, after which multiple cars exhibited this "centering" action into gore sections (and thus required manual input to avoid an incident) on video. To me, that this behavior was added via an update makes it even harder to predict - your car can pass a particular section of road without inci…

And this is exactly why all of these articles recently about how "great" it is that Tesla sends out frequent OTA updates are ridiculous. Frequent, unpredictable updates with changelogs that just read "Improvements and bug fixes" is fine when we're talking about a social media app, but is entirely unacceptable when we're talking about the software that controls a 2 ton hunk of metal flying at 70mph with humans inside of it.

The saying has been beat to death, but it bears repeating: Tesla is a prime case where the SV mindset of "move fast and break things" has resulted in "move fast and kill people". There's a reason that other vehicle manufacturers don't send out vehicle software updates willy-nilly, and it's not because they're technologically inferior.

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#118

Post by martin_bech »

rhacker wrote: post #49
martin_bech wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A counter argument that HUMAN DRIVERS are unsafe an fatal (let alone missing common sense and alertness). I 100% get your point, but my counterpoint, is that this is what we are going to see, in the future. Autonomous systems that by and large are way safer, than human drivers, but when they fail, the might do so, in circumstances where are human would not. Humans are good at some things, computers/ai/sensor suites a…

I get that in 5-10 years we MAY have SDVs that are superior than human drivers. But I think a lot of people have a mental model of SDVs _right now_ being superior to human drivers. I can't remember the crash stats, but I think the only way to know for sure is to calculate the number of miles a single human generally drives on average before they are involved in a collision or crash, etc... Now I don't have the number…

If they where better now, than humans (fully sdv) than everybody would be selling them, using them etc. That wasnt my point. My point is, even wheb they become safer, maybe even many many times safer, we are going to see some accidents, that you could argue, a human would have avoided. And it will be terrible for the people involved, there will be outcries etc. But the sum, will still be that many many lives are saved.

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#119

Post by maratd »

tptacek wrote: post #75
binarybits wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla cut ties with Mobileye in 2016, and this was a 2017 Model X, so it probably wasn't running Mobileye's software.

Pedantic: Mobileye cut ties with Tesla, not the other way around.

Yes, after Mobileye (now Intel) learned there was an internal Tesla effort to replace them.

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#120

Post by mmusson »

falcolas wrote: post #97
Animats wrote: post #42

NTSB: • At 8 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was following a lead vehicle and was traveling about 65 mph. • At 7 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla began a left steering movement while following a lead vehicle. • At 4 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was no longer following a lead vehicle. • At 3 seconds prior to the crash and up to the time of impact with the crash attenuator, the Tesla’s speed increas…

One more thing to note - anecdotal evidence indicates that Tesla cars did not attempt to center within a lane prior to an OTA update, after which multiple cars exhibited this "centering" action into gore sections (and thus required manual input to avoid an incident) on video. To me, that this behavior was added via an update makes it even harder to predict - your car can pass a particular section of road without inci…

I tried to convince management that the “reveries” were leading to unpredictable behavior.
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