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

Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 244 posts

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#111

Post by [deleted] »

lovemenot wrote: post #90
dchichkov wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be even worse than that. They likely think that they are on the path, because they are running a massive data-collection campaign on the sensor suite installed on the fleet. But the reality might be different. Running a data collection campaign is easy. Engineering products with machine learning is hard. Most of the teams don't even know what they need to know, to do it right. And so they engage into classic…

>> Running a data collection campaign is easy. Not sure why you think so. If this is correct, there should be many other equivalent or better campaigns currently running at the same scale, right? On the contrary, I imagine that data is a very significant limiting factor in this field. Both data and computation are hard problems. AFAIK Tesla should still be leading in the former category by virtue of the number of its…

[deleted]

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#112

Post by rayiner »

Retric wrote: post #82
Someone wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few things you’ll have to correct for: - Tesla’s cars are newer and more expensive than the average car on US roads (making them safer) - Tesla’s Autopilot mostly, if not only, gets used on roads that are safer than average. - Tesla drivers may have had to intervene a lot to prevent more deaths. - not all those Tesla’s ended up on US roads (probably not something with large impact)

Don't get me wrong they very well may be significantly less safe than an attentive human driver in good conditions on good roads. However, they are reasonably close and the average driver is not going to improve any time soon while self driving cars will. The trend of things machines can do better than people really only goes in one direction. Further people are vastly worse at driving than they think, over 1.25 mill…

In the U.S., people drive 3.22 trillion miles per year. At about 40,000 deaths per year, that's one death per 80 million miles driven.

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#113

Post by octothorp3 »

stevenwoo wrote: post #25
tracer4201 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't hit me that way. Sounds more like we as consumers misinterpret what the technology is and trust it too much... of course, there's a feedback loop where companies like Tesla call everything autonomous and hype the marketing to mislead consumers.

It seems like the radar/camera system Toyota uses for its Pre Collision System has the same weaknesses as Tesla's sensor suite but the list of exceptions in the Toyota manual is pretty brutally honest about the issues. Just for pedestrians it warns: Some pedestrians such as the following may not be detected by the radar sensor and camera sensor, preventing the system from operating properly: • Pedestrians shorter tha…

Huh, most of these I can understand with my layman's understanding of the sensors involved, but why would it miss the pedestrians who are on a metal manhole cover?

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#114

Post by toss1 »

kjksf wrote: post #98
rwbcxrz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived and drove in the Phoenix metro area for many years, and there are very, very few areas that are as dense as most other cities. On top of that, the infrastructure is relatively new, the roads and lanes are nice and wide, and weather isn't a major concern almost all the time. GP's assertion that driving in Phoenix is easier than most other places is absolutely correct.

His assertion was that it's 100x harder to drive in Detroit during winter than in Phoenix. Is that absolutely correct? I don't dispute that Phoenix is easier to drive than San Francisco or Detroit during winter. It's perfectly rational to debut such service in the easiest possible environment. I just don't think that it's a fundamentally different problem to make this work elsewhere. This technology already improved…

Phoenix could easily be 100x easier than a snowy winter environment.

It is one thing to have broad streets, well marked, with multiple levels of marking, e.g., stripes, plus curbs, plus medians/sidewalks, plus trees/shrubbery. All of these well-designed and well-built modern road features cooperate to make a consistently recognizable environment. And the lack of serious weather is a big deal too.

Contrast that to a city like Detroit or Boston, where the streets are anything from modern to ancient, literally paved over the cow-paths, constantly changing with construction, lucky if the lane markings are still visible, pedestrians in all kinds of odd situations (legal and illegal) -- orders of magnitude more difficult to sort the environment. Now add snow in quantities enough to make it often difficult as an experienced human driver to figure out where you are in the lanes, and then snowbanks in odd places after it is cleared'.

Sure, it's still 4 wheels, power plant, steering wheel, roads, but two quite different games.

Going for a walk in Central Park at lunch and hiking up Denali in Alaska are also ostensibly similar activities, but in actual reality, are very different games.

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#116

Post by ams6110 »

amelius wrote: post #67
Retric wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance companies which have hard data will lower your rates if your car has autopilot. I am sure they base that on hard data I don't have. If you have better data than I would love to see it. But, IMO using ballpark numbers is much better than simply having a bad feeling about something. These cars are not going to fail the same way people do. Computers really fuck up in broad daylight, people get drunk and drive…

> Insurance companies which have hard data will lower your rates if your car has autopilot. That's probably because Tesla is liable. And it could be that at this point they don't mind operating at a loss in this area.

Where I live, the owner of the car is legally liable for damage that it does. Not the manufacturer, and not the driver.

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#117

Post by userbinator »

Merad wrote: post #30
secabeen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's amazing is that, prior to that article, I had no idea that collision avoiding system at high speed would ignore any stationary object, even if it's right in front of you... This changes dramatically how I'll perceive such assisted technology from now on. Yeah, they all put it in the manual, but who reads those?

My parents bought a new 2018 Camry a few weeks ago that came with a manual roughly an inch thick. Expecting anyone to read it is bordering on delusional. I say this as someone who often does read manuals (because I’m a nerd).

An inch thick? That's roughly the size I'd expect a service manual to be, but I struggle to think of why the operator's manual would need to have so much content.

(Unless it's because they decided to print the same thing in 200 different languages. I've seen that with some other equipment --- surprisingly thick manual, but a tiny fraction of it is actually in English.)

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#118

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

octothorp3 wrote: post #113
stevenwoo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like the radar/camera system Toyota uses for its Pre Collision System has the same weaknesses as Tesla's sensor suite but the list of exceptions in the Toyota manual is pretty brutally honest about the issues. Just for pedestrians it warns: Some pedestrians such as the following may not be detected by the radar sensor and camera sensor, preventing the system from operating properly: • Pedestrians shorter tha…

Huh, most of these I can understand with my layman's understanding of the sensors involved, but why would it miss the pedestrians who are on a metal manhole cover?

Not a Toyota engineer familiar with the problem, but my guess is a metal object produces a radar reflection significantly different from a pedestrian.

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#119

Post by azernik »

trashcan wrote: post #105
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #59

>> So the people designing the next generation of autonomous driving systems are going to need a fundamental philosophical shift. Instead of treating cruise control, lane-keeping, and emergency braking as distinct systems, advanced driver assistance systems need to become integrated systems with a sophisticated understanding of the car's surroundings. My understanding was that self-driving systems are trained end-to-…

"braking"!

Well, if they don't brake for firetrucks and do brake for shiny patches of ground, then they're also breaking systems.

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#120

Post by azernik »

buvanshak wrote: post #108
macspoofing wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only irresponsible car company has been Tesla (and Uber). All the other companies positioned their adaptive systems correctly and very conservatively. Tesla came out and downright asserted their system was autonomous[1]. Predictably, they have since had to scale that back significantly. [1] https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/videos/autopilot-self-driving-ha...

They have also been asked to rename the "Autopilot" feature.. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bertelschmitt/2016/10/14/german...

Ooooh. The German original is harsh. "So-called Autopilot."
Post reply on HN