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

Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 236 posts

Re: Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

#221

Post by saalweachter »

dahfizz wrote: post #217
cardiffspaceman wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my view the wreck isn’t made worse so much by absolute magnitude of one momentum vector as by the magnitude of the difference in momentum vectors.

You have to consider that after a wreck, both cars have to come to a stop one way or the other. Imagine being rear ended while you are stopped at a stop sign. The difference in momentum is small and there is no significant damage. Now imagine going 80mph down the highway and someone going 81mph hits the back of your car. Still a very small difference in momentum, but your car is very likely to lose control and roll o…

To put it another way, every collision you are in is also a collision with the Earth, which masses a lot more than you and wins every exchange of momentum.

Conveniently, your delta-v with this massive body you don't want to run into is also the one conventionally reported for your speed.

Re: Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

#222

Post by smt88 »

chingjun wrote: post #136
smt88 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree because we're comparing what this individual driver would have done without a feature advertised as Autopilot. I'm a partner in an auto insurance company, and most of our no-accident records will stay that way, statistically speaking. If this driver had a one in a billion miles chance of crashing and Autopilot (with an inattentve driver, as they all tend to be) had a one in a million miles chance, then Aut…

How do you know that this individual driver has a one in a billion miles chance of crashing? By statistics from other human drivers I assume?

I didn't say that I knew. I was only disputing the relevance of defending individual Tesla crashes by saying that Tesla's are, on average, less likely to crash when on Autopilot. You can't compare Tesla drivers on Autopilot to all drivers -- you have to compare them to themselves, or you have an extraneous variable.

Fatal human accidents are on the order of 1-10 every billion miles of driving in the US, yes. Tesla Autopilot crashes seem to be much, much, much more common.

Re: Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

#223

Post by Dylan16807 »

AndrewBissell wrote: post #204
Dylan16807 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, though? I could buy a car with 3 star crash ratings, and people would be fine with that. I could get in a taxi with a mediocre driver, and people would be fine with that. Why does the comparison have to be to me driving, in a car like this ? When I'm shopping for a car, it makes sense. But for public policy discussions, what matters is how the safety ranks against the general population.

The question is whether "Autopilot" is safer than "No Autopilot" ceteris paribus , because if it isn't, then a trivial regulation to make the roads safer with zero downside is to just ban Autopilot. You can't determine whether Autopilot makes driving safer by comparing miles driven only on highways by Teslas to miles driven across the whole vehicle fleet.

> then a trivial regulation to make the roads safer with zero downside is to just ban Autopilot

That assume almost everyone using autopilot will replace that with manual driving in the same car. Some of them might get cheaper cars or take uber and end up less safe.

And even then, there's lots of stuff you can do to a car that makes it less safe that we don't ban, as long as it's still sufficiently safe.

If anything, increase safety standards. If you want to do something that won't cost extra money then do something to ban oversized cars at the same time...

Re: Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

#224

Post by Corrado »

urban_strike wrote: post #188
greglindahl wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adaptive cruise control makes dumb mistakes. Cruise control makes dumb mistakes. I know people who think automatic transmissions makes people worse drivers.

> I know people who think automatic transmissions makes people worse drivers. Well, it's certainly a bit trickier to to respond to texts or browse instagram when you need two hands to operate the vehicle.

You would probably be surprised what a person with 30+ years behind the stick can do while operating a manual transmission vehicle.

Re: Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

#225

Post by mixmastamyk »

Retric wrote: post #64
mixmastamyk wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like dumb policy to me. Why wouldn’t it stop for a boulder or fallen tree?

/devils advocate False positives are dangerous. Trying to detect ‘Anything’ may result in more deaths than hitting the tiny number of exceptions. Alternatively, the system would be overly flakey and hard break all the time.

Slowing down is a lot safer than plowing into a stationary object at high speed. This is so obvious there must be something missing to the conversation.

Re: Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

#226

Post by mixmastamyk »

greglindahl wrote: post #112
mixmastamyk wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like dumb policy to me. Why wouldn’t it stop for a boulder or fallen tree?

Because it's a Level 2 system, and it doesn't actually know how to drive a car. Similar to how cruise control (Level 1) doesn't know how to drive a car. Yet people are willing to put up with the concept that it causes some accidents.

Doesn’t need to. It needs to slow to a stop when approaching a large stationary object, car or not.

Re: Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

#227

Post by nabdab »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #9

Fire truck driver here: People crash into parked fire trucks and ambulances and cop cars all the damn time . That's why we park the Big Red Truck at an angle behind the accident -- so that when the 2-ton car crashes into the 30-ton truck, the car will bounce off and the people behind the truck (us) won't be injured. I don't disagree that Tesla's software is partly to blame here, but the null experiment also has a lou…

The argument that Tesla is not fully to blame because people also fails seems fundamentally flawed. A human driver at fault cannot avoid blame by simple asserting that other human drivers also make similar mistakes.

Re: Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

#228

Post by greglindahl »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #226
greglindahl wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's a Level 2 system, and it doesn't actually know how to drive a car. Similar to how cruise control (Level 1) doesn't know how to drive a car. Yet people are willing to put up with the concept that it causes some accidents.

Doesn’t need to. It needs to slow to a stop when approaching a large stationary object, car or not.

That's a level 3 requirement, not level 2.

Re: Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

#229

Post by sjwright »

jakeogh wrote: post #39
wbl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This report is about determining what features are inherently dangerous. It is very relevant that autopilot can't detect vehicles.

A common marketing trick is to steal a word by naming your product it. Suddenly you have Autopilot when it's really "Autopilot". Or better "Tesla Autopilot".

Yes, a respectable company like Chrysler wouldn't use such an inaccurate term.

https://i2.wp.com/www.curbsideclassic.com/wp-content/uploads...

Re: Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

#230

Post by Retric »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #225
Retric wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/devils advocate False positives are dangerous. Trying to detect ‘Anything’ may result in more deaths than hitting the tiny number of exceptions. Alternatively, the system would be overly flakey and hard break all the time.

Slowing down is a lot safer than plowing into a stationary object at high speed. This is so obvious there must be something missing to the conversation.

Self driving cars are going to be driven a lot, so something that’s a 1/10,000 risk that happens every week to 1 million cars is going to happen every day.

Self driving cars need to have a threshold before hard breaking. Hard breaking is risky, it can cause serious accidents. Reducing that threshold thus increases some risks even if it lowers others.

So, now we need to balance a risk of say ~1/10,000,000 per car per year vs what? I don’t know what changing those thresholds would result in, but I do know it’s not free and there would be false positives.

Post reply on HN