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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

#201

Post by atomicUpdate »

jstanley wrote: post #77
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…

I don't think he said he's willing to die. He said he's willing to test it, and presumably he'll continue concentrating and will manually take over if the car does something dangerous.

That's assuming he's always able to intervene before it kills him. The argument is that he may not always be able to or prevent AP from behaving erratically enough that results in killing someone else (while he saves his own life).

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

#202

Post by MertsA »

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…

Here's autopilot swerving into oncoming traffic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBaolsFyD9I

Here's autopilot following a lane straight into a concrete barrier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ml6sjk_8c

You can't assume that autopilot won't screw up lane following and swerve into a large obstacle. In those situations it's not as simple as making sure the lane ahead of you is clear, you might only have a split second warning between Autopilot going into "casual murder mode" and a collision.

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

#203

Post by gamblor956 »

eclipxe wrote: post #145
tbabb wrote: post #60

I have been yelling about this for a long time: Tesla is not going to be able to deliver full self-driving as promised. They don't have the hardware, for one (ranging is terrible; they need stereo cameras), and second, their software strategy seems to be a dead end. They need sensor fusion. The system needs to make maximum use of all the information available to it: Where is the road striping? Where are the other car…

They do have stereo cameras and sensor fusing, as well as detecting more than just the lines in the road. Here is what the camera sees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rACZACXgreQ

Stereo cameras overlap. Tesla's cameras are intended for 360-degree coverage, not overlapping vision.

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

#204

Post by gamblor956 »

mdorazio wrote: post #168
Joe-Z wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars have gotten so safe though. There's all this measures put in place to ensure your survival _in case of a crash_. Wouldn't it be more relevant to calculate the chances of getting injured / end up in a crash at all? I mean just being caught up in a traffic accident and have no bodily harm done to you can be a traumatic event.

Yes, this is a very important distinction. Humans have gotten pretty good at not getting killed in car accidents, mostly due to increasing safety engineering and assistance features in cars. Humans are not very good at avoiding collisions entirely. In 2016 there were 6.3 million motor vehicle accidents reported to police. And NHTSA estimates about 10 million accidents go unreported each year (mostly minor fender bend…

Humans are not very good at avoiding collisions entirely.

So far, neither are Teslas...And the point of this reddit thread is that any progress that Tesla does make on this front can be instantly reverted in a future update.

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

#205

Post by SilasX »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #185
FireBeyond wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla drivers have the luxury of turning autopilot off in suboptimal conditions. Human drivers don't. Like you say, this number is really valuable only for Tesla marketing.

Tesla would have had 0 fatalities in total if the Autopilot disengaged just before hitting the barrier.

For all driving protocols P, and accidents A, P would have zero fatalities if it switched to a better protocol just before encountering the situation that led to A.

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

#206

Post by xkjkls »

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…

> It is obviously troubling to see self driving cars run into solid and stationary objects, but human drivers do that all the time too. The question shouldn't be whether this technology is perfect, it should be whether this technology is safer than humans. You and I certainly don't have enough data to say one way or another on that. I would bet even Tesla doesn't have enough data to say definitively. However writing this tech off as unsafe just because it makes what seems like an obvious mistake is a great way to slow progress which will result in more human deaths long term.

And where is the research to show that? To prove that within any significance, they would have to have millions and millions of miles to compare against human drivers. This is new technology and making false claims about its safety is dangerous.

We as a society force drug companies to rigorously show that their drugs do what they say they do and all of their side effects are properly accounted for. This should be the case here too.

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

#207

Post by LoSboccacc »

thomasjudge wrote: post #181
close04 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because Tesla marketing material doesn't tell the whole truth, just the selected bit that sounds impressive. The conditions in which the Autopilot is safer than a human driver are so narrow and under so many restrictions that it's obvious it's less "self driving" and more "driver assist". Indeed, I also find it disingenuous to claim the Autopilot is safer than a human driver even if it actually can't function at…

It's because -in general- marketing material doesn't tell the whole truth, just the selected bit that sounds impressive.

but still there's quite some difference in the fine prints between a new MacBook being "two times faster than previous model#" and a Tesla "comes with full self driving hardware&"

# only on specific workloads

& don't ever get distracted because it can literally kill you

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

#208

Post by [deleted] »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #17
anth_anm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if Boeing got away with just pushing a software update to the 737 MAX8 and saying "it's fixed now".

Well, it might have prevented the second crash if they had treated the matter with a bit more urgency. Depends on whether the two incidents really had a common cause, which is looking like the case. Of course it's also looking like they should have grounded the fleet after the first crash, given the history of the aircraft prior to its last flight.

[deleted]

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

#209

Post by jimktrains2 »

gamblor956 wrote: post #194
slg wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but a lot of people are arguing something along the lines of "there is a bug in the pacemaker, let's take take out everyone's pacemakers". I am not saying we shouldn't be critical of Tesla or hold them accountable for their product. My point is simply that their product doesn't have to be infallible for it to still be an improvement over the current solution.

A pacemaker has objective improvements over the alternative, namely, death. So if a pacemaker has a bug, it's still overwhelmingly better than the baseline scenario of "no pacemakers." A self-driving Tesla is not objectively better than a regular, human-driven car. The jury's still out on whether any self-driving car is even as good as the average human driver, so if one of them has a bug that causes serious accident…

> So if a pacemaker has a bug, it's still overwhelmingly better than the baseline scenario of "no pacemakers."

Unless it goes of when it's not needed and kills you.

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

#210

Post by 0815test »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #186
slg wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just a silly argument to me. Would anyone suggest that cruise control is worthless because you still have to steer the car?

Cruise control is useful to me because it means I won’t accidentally speed. But having to hold the wheel means I need to pay attention. If the car is driving itself human nature means you might not pay attention. Also if the car does something weird you have to decide in a split second if it is because of a hazard you haven’t seen but the car has, or because the software went wrong.

You do have to hold the wheel, precisely because you might find yourself having to assess what the car is doing "in a split second", and possibly issue corrective actions. You can't do that unless you are holding the wheel and are paying attention to what the car is doing! But all that means is that the car is not really driving itself; it is however dealing with the boring, predictable parts of the job and leaving the rest up to you - this makes it easier to be attentive, not harder. The tasks where it's hard to pay continued attention are ones where you have to do something that seems extremely predictable, but also has very rare events where it isn't. Computer assistance can actually help a lot with such cases.
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