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Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

arstechnica.com

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

#141

Post by LoSboccacc »

Retric wrote: post #48
paulie_a wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be honest, actual mass deployed self driving tech is probably 20 years away at minimum. I personally might be able to enjoy it just before I retire.

I think these are already fairly close to human fatality rates. Tessa is well over 300,000 cars sold, if the average car has 10k miles that's 3 billion. Edit: actual number well over that https://electrek.co/2016/11/13/tesla-autopilot-billion-miles... Using US fatality rates you would expect ~34 deaths from that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the... Edit, my numbers where low. So, as far as…

Here, all the numbers on tesla safety debunked https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In-Gear/2016/1014/How-saf...

They stopped giving mile driven statistics after that.

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

#142

Post by amelius »

ams6110 wrote: post #116
amelius wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Unless the car was on autopilot. And the car records this fact in its black box.

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

#143

Post by amelius »

Retric wrote: post #85
amelius wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

don't mind operating at a loss That's ridiculous, they might base this on some other benifit such as type of owner, but the industry is not just going to subsidize 100,000+ plus people. I am not saying it's fool proof, but your bias is showing.

I mean Tesla doesn't mind operating at a loss, as they are trying to push autopilot to the market.

By the way, the black box recorder in a Tesla might also contribute to the discount given by insurers.

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

#144

Post by bartread »

A common situation, certainly on British motorways in relatively heavy traffic, is to be tooling along at 70mph, and then have to come to a halt - or drop to 20mph - fairly abruptly due to waves of slow moving traffic that move backwards along the carriageway. I wonder how well such systems would handle that kind of situation, where obstacles might not be stationary, but the speed difference is large?

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

#145

Post by buvanshak »

dmode wrote: post #139
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...

Tesla literally never says that autopilot system is self driving and has repeated nags and reminders to keep hands on the wheel and pay attention. This message is repeated during onboarding, training videos, and manual etc. 99% of Tesla owners follow these instructions. There will of course be 1% drivers who will not.

>99% of Tesla owners follow these instructions. There will of course be 1% drivers who will not.

Where did you pull those numbers from?

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

#146

Post by em500 »

dmode wrote: post #139
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...

Tesla literally never says that autopilot system is self driving and has repeated nags and reminders to keep hands on the wheel and pay attention. This message is repeated during onboarding, training videos, and manual etc. 99% of Tesla owners follow these instructions. There will of course be 1% drivers who will not.

This is their marketing copy: https://www.tesla.com/autopilot

Somewhere in the middle of the page there's one "Every driver is responsible for remaining alert and active when using Autopilot, and must be prepared to take action at any time." But everything on the rest of the page is about convincing you that the car can drive itself better than you can.

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

#147

Post by WhiteSource1 »

rayiner wrote: post #31

What this shows is that Tesla isn’t even on the path to self-driving technology. It sounds like “Autopilot” has no world model (or an extremely basic one)—it ignores stationary objects because it can’t tell whether it’s approaching something on the side of a road that curves away versus an obstacle in the lane. It can’t tell because it doesn’t know what the car is going to do and what the lane is going to do. That’s…

Self-driving cars are a bit of a misnomer and understanding the limitations helps to understand the potential as well.

It's like planes which run on autopilot -- there is still a pilot. In addition to takeoffs and landings, the pilot is there to adjust. Self-driving cars seem to be similar -- hands off 95% of the time (and not 100% as some might expect), but that 5% that they are hands on are critical.

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

#148

Post by stevesimmons »

bartread wrote: post #144

A common situation, certainly on British motorways in relatively heavy traffic, is to be tooling along at 70mph, and then have to come to a halt - or drop to 20mph - fairly abruptly due to waves of slow moving traffic that move backwards along the carriageway. I wonder how well such systems would handle that kind of situation, where obstacles might not be stationary, but the speed difference is large?

It depends on the detector used. Radar in particular is bad for stationary obstacles because it can't separate reflections from the ground from a stationary obstacle. Moving objects are no problem because their radar reflections gets doppler-shifted and can then be separated the ground clutter.

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

#149

Post by blendo »

School-Cotton wrote: post #80
kjksf wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is definition of "mass"? Waymo almost certainly will launch this year a fully self driving service, accessible to anyone, "within parts of the Phoenix metropolitan area, including Chandler, Tempe, Mesa and Gilbert" ( https://waymo.com/apply/faq/ ) which is where their pilot program has been running for several months now. See e.g. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/10/it-sure-looks-like-waym... They already have…

What makes you think "works in Phoenix" is anywhere near "works in most places" ? I think the difficulty of driving in Phoenix suburbs is maybe 1% of the difficulty of driving in urban areas, anywhere with snow and rain, etc.

It’s true that the probability of collision is likely lower on the dry, wide, and well-maintained roads of Phoenix, but given the higher speeds (higher kinetic energy), the probability of injury/death per collision is likely higher.

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

#150

Post by ZephyrP »

paulie_a wrote: post #32
rayiner wrote: post #31

What this shows is that Tesla isn’t even on the path to self-driving technology. It sounds like “Autopilot” has no world model (or an extremely basic one)—it ignores stationary objects because it can’t tell whether it’s approaching something on the side of a road that curves away versus an obstacle in the lane. It can’t tell because it doesn’t know what the car is going to do and what the lane is going to do. That’s…

Let's be honest, actual mass deployed self driving tech is probably 20 years away at minimum. I personally might be able to enjoy it just before I retire.

Reading this comment (and the many like it) I get the feeling that something essential must be getting left out when we're speaking of the "far-off mass-deployed self-driving tech". Mostly because it directly contradicts my day-to-day experience.

I've personally seen a few "self-driving cars" on the streets of SF and I suspect many of you reading this have as well (particularly if you live in the Mission or South Park).

Just last year I was talkng with engineers at the self-driving car company "Cruise" which had a free internal app to taxi employees around with a self-driving car. I personally saw the tech demoed. One of the engineers called one up to go drinking the weekend prior (sans drinking buddies - company policy). He claimed his coworkers come to work in them occasionally. The cars and engineers could be a grand charade but it seems like "self-driving cars" are already used by non-daredevils every weekday.

I learned to drive on backroads of rural Colorado; It may be these cars are safer than I in the sometimes "adverse" driving conditions of San Francisco.

Is this really how a distant technology looks?

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