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

arstechnica.com

371–380 of 546 posts

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

#371
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, are you not in the U.S.? These types of lane dividers are incredibly common throughout the country. Note that I'm not defending the safety of them; I'm just surprised to see someone call them out as a hazard as they're such a common sight.

Dutch citizen here, I have never seen something like this. To compare, here's a similar situation in The Netherlands: https://www.google.nl/maps/@52.0928662,5.1734685,3a,75y,281.... Points of interest: - big solid white arrow, line-fade is nearly impossible - white-green sign indicating that the road is splitting - big shoulder in the continuation of the division - loads of grass instead of immediately using a metal…

Here's an example of a crash attenuator right near your example: https://www.google.nl/maps/@52.0928978,5.1609792,3a,60y,305....

Edit: Also, that gore is freshly painted. Here's the same gore with faded paint. Mind you, it wasn't as bad, but even there you get faded painting: https://www.google.nl/maps/@52.0928706,5.1608083,3a,75y,109....

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

#372
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…

Reservation cancelled.

While the anti-tesla news is bad, tesla needs to be more clear that this really is a failure of autopilot and their model - they can't expect a human to get used to something working perfectly, clearly is hands were close to the wheel in the very recent past (tesla is famous for not reading hands on wheel).

I'm hoping google can deliver something a bit safer.

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

#373
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the thing, it clearly didn’t detect the obstacle. Given that there were no (known) obstacles, it behaved correctly. Fix the obstacle detection.

The problem is it's entirely possible the obstacle detection is un-fixable without swapping out the sensor suite the Tesla ships with. Tesla is quite clearly expecting the problem to be solvable with that sensor suite alone (this is more-or-less the line I was given by a Tesla seller when I was shopping for a car), so it's not going to be in the T-sheet for them to recall every Tesla on the road to fit a LIDAR to the…

Yup. I'm guessing that they got too much false positives with their radar system, a car stopping for no reason on the freeway would be a deal-breaker for customers.

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

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried to find something similar in an urban area in Britain, here's one in Birmingham: https://www.google.nl/maps/@52.4901761,-1.889549,3a,69.6y,5.... That fence wouldn't be fun to drive into at full speed, and the lane markings are worn, but it's still far less awful than a concrete wall.

At highway speeds, if that "fence" is strong enough to prevent vehicles from falling from the raised left lane into the lower right lanes, then it would seem likely to cut a car in two. I think I'd prefer the crash attenuator.

That segment of the A38 has a 30MPH limit, with the right fork increasing to 50MPH. The dynamics of any crash would be very difficult.

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

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems testable. IANAAE (I Am Not An Automotive Engineer), but why can't you run both the new and old code side by side and if the actions they take are materially different investigate further? Like, if in one case the new code would want you to move left, and the old code goes straight, one of those behaviors is probably wrong. If the driver corrects, then the new code is probably correct, but if the driver doe…

It has already been touched on by another commenter, but testability of Machine Learned systems outside of a training dataset is pretty much a crapshoot. An ML solution stops "learning" after training and only reacts. To illustrate the difference, have you driven on roads under construction lately? As humans, when you've driven the same road hundreds of times, you start to do the same thing as a machine learned imple…

Basically AI is a sophisticated ' hotdog not hotdog'.

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

#377
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add to that, the last bullet point from page 2 of the official preliminary report[1]: At 3 seconds prior to the crash and up to the time of impact with the crash attenuator, the Tesla’s speed increased from 62 to 70.8 mph, with no precrash braking or evasive steering movement detected. That to me is a strong indicator that Tesla's AP2 can not recognize a crashed attenuator, probably one of the strongest argument that…

This happens with regular adaptive cruise control on my Ford, when the cruise control set point is a lot higher than the current speed: the car accelerates after another car clears the lane and ram into things.

My Camry Hybrid sometimes picks up cars in the lane next to me and a car length ahead, to match speed with them. And sometimes it loses the car ahead of it on turns. I try to aim the top of the steering wheel at the car ahead of me, and this seems to help the sensor a great deal.

On turns, it doesn't accelerate, only maintains speed; can be frustrating if you want to act like a racecar driver. For example, following someone around a freeway curve at 45mph, and the other driver changes out of your lane. Despite having adaptive cruise set to 60mph (or higher), it will stay at 45mph until after the curve, and only accelerate after ~5 seconds of straight roadway.

It does sound the collision alert (sadly no autonomous braking here) very consistently when I'm accelerating or adaptive cruise is on, and there's a stationary object ahead.

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

#378
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…

Kudos to the NTSB. Events like this and companies like Tesla are exactly why we need regulation and government oversight. Tesla's statement that the driver was given "several warnings" is just a flat out lie.

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

#379

Tesla has to realize these "shame the dead dude" posts are PR nightmares, right? They are reason alone for me to never consider one, that a private moment for my family might end up a pawn in some "convince the public we're safe using any weasel stretch of the facts we can" effort. If this is disruption, I'll wait for the old guard to catch up, lest I be disrupted into a concrete barrier and my grieving widow fed mis…

>shame the deadman posts

If that were actually the case, then what are they supposed to say?

>lest I be disrupted into a barrier

This made me audibly chuckle.

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

#380
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or perhaps us fingers-in-ears Musk fans don't expect the AP to be perfect. Especially considering how new the fields are. Autopilot doesn't need to be perfect, just better than humans.

It must also never be worse than humans. In this case, it very clearly was.

A human driver crashed in that same exact spot one week earlier, so you can't really say AP is necessarily worse because of this accident.
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