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After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

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Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#111

Post by rhino369 »

throwaway789214 wrote: post #73

Crazy how people are blatantly ignoring that even on autopilot drivers need to be attentive and keep situational awareness at all times. I can't remember that there was ever a case in which autopilot caused a situation that an attentive driver couldn't have recovered from. Yet it is blamed on the system when people ignore this requirement and end up in an accident. Throw-away for obvious reasons...

So what’s the point of it? Not steering but needing to able to steer immediately seems much more mentally taxing than just steering.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#112

Post by benj111 »

vonmoltke wrote: post #91
lambda_lover wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's great that you're willing to die for Tesla's profit, but you realize that autonomous vehicle-induced crashes affect everyone on the road? Even someone who doesn't consent to Tesla's TOS is still sharing the road with potentially dangerous software. Granted, individual drivers are awful enough that it probably doesn't make that huge a difference in danger. But would you still feel the way if a family member was k…

> But would you still feel the way if a family member was killed in an accident where their human-controlled car was rear-ended by a Tesla? I don't have a dog in this fight, but appeals to emotion in order to drive irrational thinking do not make for constructive debate.

I disagree.

The gp said they're a "Willing guinea pig".

The parent pointed out it isn't just their lives on the line, but others, potentially including their family.

That isn't irrational at all. Or an appeal to emotion.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#113

Post by madmax96 »

0815test wrote: post #70
lisper wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The AP can only kill you if you're distracted/asleep at the wheel and not paying attention. That's not true. There are many situations where the AP could make a sudden turn and kill you long before you had time to react even if you were paying attention. And in fact, the situation in the video seem to be not so far away from that.

Make a sudden turn? It's just lane following, so I really doubt that. And if your hands are on the wheel (as they should be) you'll very quickly become aware that the car is not staying in the lane as it's supposed to, and be in the best position to deliver the right input. Even looking at this video, the car didn't seem to "turn" suddenly and unexpectedly; if anything, it failed to physically take a turn even though…

Consider how widely affected contemporary machine learning models are by adversarial examples [1]. I don't know the specific approach used by Tesla or their release process, but I would not be surprised at all if their software has similar shortcomings.

Granted, a ton of active research is going on trying to prevent these sorts of problems, but it definitely isn't a solved problem.

Basically, ask yourself this: how robust is this software? How are you measuring that?

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.07107.pdf

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#114

Post by ketzo »

slg wrote: post #106
SilasX wrote: post #7

I would be a lot more forgiving of these screwups if Tesla didn't constantly swear up and down that they've solved self-driving cars. As far back as 2016 they were claiming they had full SDC capability above human driver safety [1], and their recent Model Y announcement suggests that the only thing holding it up is regulatory approval, and not failure to achieve the desired spec. >Model Y will have Full Self-Driving…

I don't want to dismiss your whole point, because it is certainly valid, but that isn't really the issue here. It is entirely possible for bugs like this to exist in the self driving tech and for Tesla to be correct in their claims that Autopilot is on average safer than a human driver. It is obviously troubling to see self driving cars run into solid and stationary objects, but human drivers do that all the time too…

That’s one of those thorny AI-human problems, though — if I crash 1 in 10 drives, it’s my fault, and therefore much easier to rationalize to be, well, not my fault. If my Tesla crashes 1 in 100 drives, it’s a faulty machine and an obvious death trap.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#115

Post by Scoundreller »

BoorishBears wrote: post #83
Scoundreller wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m from Toronto, so I never underestimate drivers’ ability to do stupid like drive into streetcar-only tunnels past the end of the ashphalt, despite ample signage. 26 times. https://torontolife.com/city/queens-quay-streetcar-tunnel-dr...

How many hundreds of thousands of cars for those 26 to make that mistake? Now imagine if every Toyota did this instead? FSD is being touted as a "force multiplier" for safe driving, but it could end up being a force multiplier for deadly mistakes

Few care about the 26 that missed the signs.

It’s the multi-hour shutdown of the city’s 3rd busiest transit route that connects to the continent’s 3rd busiest train station that impacts a lot of people.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#116

Post by CamperBob2 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #94
CamperBob2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument would be a bit different if we were losing 30,000 people a year in airliner crashes, instead of approximately zero.

You can still save lives with automotive safety systems and not have a dumpster fire of an SDLC process. There is a spectrum between one firmware update a year and "f * it we'll do it live".

I think a big step forward would be addressing something you mentioned earlier, with respect to documenting what changed in a given update. "Bug fixes" doesn't belong in a Spotify changelog, much less one for a product made by Boeing or Tesla.

It almost seems like a right-to-repair issue, where manufacturers are going out of their way to avoid documenting how their products actually work for fear of losing control over them or of disclosing details that a competitor or patent holder might find useful.

There definitely needs to be a strong regulatory response to that kind of behavior on the manufacturer's part when it comes to safety-critical updates, or even updates that might conceivably impact safety of life. Which, in the airplane business, is basically all of them.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#117

Post by rchaud »

vonmoltke wrote: post #91
lambda_lover wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's great that you're willing to die for Tesla's profit, but you realize that autonomous vehicle-induced crashes affect everyone on the road? Even someone who doesn't consent to Tesla's TOS is still sharing the road with potentially dangerous software. Granted, individual drivers are awful enough that it probably doesn't make that huge a difference in danger. But would you still feel the way if a family member was k…

> But would you still feel the way if a family member was killed in an accident where their human-controlled car was rear-ended by a Tesla? I don't have a dog in this fight, but appeals to emotion in order to drive irrational thinking do not make for constructive debate.

> appeals to emotion in order to drive irrational thinking do not make for constructive debate.

In a perfect world, sure. Real world, you will never have an inherently emotional situation (road safety) where the only voices heard are those of completely detached individuals.

As humans, we have to figure out ways to connect with them, and empathize with what they're feeling. Simply dismissing their concerns as driven by emotion isn't a winning strategy.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#118

Post by benj111 »

trhway wrote: post #52
paul7986 wrote: post #22

Scary... software developers at these robotic cars and their mistakes/bugs aren’t just going to bring down a business application(lose money) but kill their customers and innocent drivers. Progress to where it’s safer is going to be a killer and we the drivers on the road are unwilling guinea pigs to billionaires’ dreams/goals.

> we the drivers on the road are unwilling guinea pigs to billionaires’ dreams/goals. we'll adapt, ie. adjust our behavior to account for that new factor. Police for example have already learnt how to pretty safely stop a Tesla on autopilot with a driver sleeping behind the wheel and not reacting to any signals (because of being deadly drunk for example).

I like comments where you can't tell if the author is defending something, or absolutely condemning it.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#119

Post by tptacek »

Scoundreller wrote: post #98
SilasX wrote: post #7

I would be a lot more forgiving of these screwups if Tesla didn't constantly swear up and down that they've solved self-driving cars. As far back as 2016 they were claiming they had full SDC capability above human driver safety [1], and their recent Model Y announcement suggests that the only thing holding it up is regulatory approval, and not failure to achieve the desired spec. >Model Y will have Full Self-Driving…

> As far back as 2016 they were claiming they had full SDC capability above human driver safety One crash/incident doesn’t mean it’s less safe than a human driver on average , even if it’s something a human driver might have avoided. We should expect different failure modes from a machine, but adopt it anyway if it avoids enough human failure modes to make up for it. Source: my thermostat thought 33C was an acceptabl…

Don't Teslas fare significantly worse than cars in similar class in terms of driver fatalities?

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#120

Post by smileysteve »

maxxxxx wrote: post #99
nathanaldensr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unwilling? Don't buy a Tesla. Don't believe the hype. It's that simple. Granted, there is nothing stopping any ECU from killing you, but I'd trust a company like Honda way before Tesla.

"Unwilling? Don't buy a Tesla." That doesn't protect me from being killed by a Tesla. I am pretty neutral on the topic but I am getting the feeling that they are in danger of pushing out half baked stuff like we tend to do in software. For most things like software this is OK but maybe not for things that are moving at high speeds.

Reminder that it has been and still is the norm for the last half century for 30k people to die in car accidents each year. Many more injured and disabled.

Better yet, texting while driving increases the risk of an accident while driving 23x

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