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Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

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Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#571

Post by oblio »

spookthesunset wrote: post #111
perl4ever wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like the idea of automatic braking, but arguably plenty of people had irrational fears about seat belts and air bags (although the fears about air bags seem to be coming back)...so I will seriously consider the new safety features once my car insurance offers a significant discount for them.

Good ones only engage when you don’t act fast enough. They’ll also press the brake pedal harder if it thinks you aren’t pressing hard enough fast enough. Ours only engages when it is truly justified. It has yet to flip its shit incorrectly. It’s adaptive cruise control on the other hand will sometimes freak out about cars in adjacent lanes and slow down more than it should.

Our Volvo V40 saved our butt once on the highway. Late at night, cars piling up all of a sudden in front of us. The car slammed the brakes and stopped us a few meters away from the car in front :-)

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#572

Post by bluGill »

skat20phys wrote: post #476
lb1lf wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe every car manufacturer has a disclaimer that the autopilot can only be used as an assist. That the driver needs to keep his eyes on the road, and ready to intervene at any given time. -This is the scariest bit, IMHO. Basically, autopilot is well enough developed to mostly work under normal conditions; humans aren't very good at staying alert for extended periods of time just monitoring something which mos…

This "driver aid" model itself is starting to sound like a problem to me. You either have safe, autonomous driving or you don't. A model where a driver is assumed to disengage attention, etc but then be expected to rengage in a fraction of a second to respond to an anomalous event is fundamentally at its core flawed I think. It's like asking a human to drive and not drive at the same time. Most driving laws assume a…

Which is why most car companies long ago said they wanted to skip level 3 and go direct to level 4. With level 4 when the car can't drive it will stop and give the human plenty of time to take over.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#573

Post by vxNsr »

zaroth wrote: post #326
keanzu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GM calls theirs Super Cruise which is true hands-free. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxeK0F-D3gg

GM claims "over 5,000,000 miles of hands free miles driven and counting." Current estimates of AutoPilot miles driven is ~ 2 billion miles. [1] That's 400x the number of miles driven under AutoPilot. I think it mainly comes down to number of vehicles. SuperCruise is only availble on CT6 which sells about 1,000 vehicles a quarter, and not all trims even have SuperCruise. The CT5 is supposed to be offered with SuperCru…

Super Cruise is inherently different from AP. It only works on roads that GM has driven and scanned themselves. It’s a lot more cautious and much less ambitious.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#574

Post by ghaff »

keanzu wrote: post #483
Alupis wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole self driving, fully autonomous thing has become some sort of strange faux-religion. It's followers see no other possible solution as acceptable. Instead of putting our heads together to make really good driver assistance technologies and being satisfied, the darn thing needs to also drive itself everywhere otherwise we're leaving something on the table! Untill we have zero deaths, we cannot stop demanding…

SAE Level 5 is completely transformative, it will utterly change the market and the use of cars. Once you can conveniently call up an automated Uber the need, at least in cities, to buy your own car will effectively vanish. This is Uber's endgame - get humans out of the loop. As long as cars still need human drivers this cost savings can't be realized. > Forget better braking systems that apply themselves automatical…

Why is it transformative? Especially in cities. You have Ubers/taxis/private cars/etc. today. So you hypothetically cut the costs (maybe) in half of hailing a ride. Which is speculative. Does that really transform your use of transportation? I doubt it would change my use of cars one bit.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#575

Post by oblio »

cmroanirgo wrote: post #154
perl4ever wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And within a few minutes we got freaked out with what seem to us as unpredictable action and we turned it off." On the one hand, I'm affected by the FUD and will not buy a Tesla, and perhaps also will have schadenfreude to the extent their CEO has misfortunes. On the other hand, to be fair, other driver assistance features are creating problems too. I think it was Subaru I was just reading about having serious probl…

I remember an engineering class at uni in the early 90's discussing how cruise control worked, and was borderline horrified at the childish simplicity of the design. In all this time, I've probably used it 1/2 dozen times, because my trust level is very low. Just the other day I was a passenger in a Peugot and it was raining very heavily. Cruise control automatically disabled when one of the tyres suddenly bogged dow…

It's been almost 30 years, you might want to revisit that decision.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#576

Post by lb1lf »

kortex wrote: post #562
lb1lf wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I fail to see the point of autopilot at all if you're supposed to be able to correct it at any instant in real-world driving conditions. -The cynic in me suggests we need autopilot as a testbed on the way to the holy grail of Level 5 autonomous vehicles. The engineer in me fears that problem may be a tad too difficult to solve given existing infrastructure - that is, we'd probably need to retrofit all sorts of sens…

Road sensors ain't gonna fix the long tail of L5. We can't even upkeep roads as is, like crash attenuators, which would have mitigated the fatality in OP article. Also, highway lane splits are very dangerous in general. It's a concrete spear with 70mph cars whizzing right towards it. Around here, they just use barrels of material, sand I believe. Somebody crashes into one, they clean the wreck, and lug out some more…

It isn't the SOLE action for L5 to be feasible, but I believe it is a REQUIRED action. (Emphasis added not to insinuate you'd need it, but rather to show, well, my emphasis. :))

For the foreseeable future, there's simply too many variables outside autopilot manufacturers' control; I cannot see how car-borne sensors alone will be able to provide the level of confidence needed to do L5 safely.

Oh, and a mix of self-driving and bipedal, carbon-based-driven ones on the roads does not do anything to make it simpler, as those bipedal, carbon-based drivers tend to do unpredictable things every now and then. It'll probably be easier when (if) all cars are L5.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#577

Post by tbrock »

fxtentacle wrote: post #187

I avoid new technology, exactly because I'm an engineer. I wonder if that is just me, but when new technology is introduced and hyped, I usually take a quick look at implementations, research, and talks just to get an idea of what the state of the art really is like. As a result, I have become the late adopter among my group of friends because the first iteration of any new technology usually just isn't worth the iss…

Plus... what’s the point? Maybe we automate a couple jobs for long haul shipping or road trips but what a fruitless effort!

Why don’t we work on drones that pick us up and take us places to really leap ahead, get out of traffic, and do something amazing?

Cars driving themselves? How incremental.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#578

Post by neilalexander »

oblio wrote: post #571
spookthesunset wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good ones only engage when you don’t act fast enough. They’ll also press the brake pedal harder if it thinks you aren’t pressing hard enough fast enough. Ours only engages when it is truly justified. It has yet to flip its shit incorrectly. It’s adaptive cruise control on the other hand will sometimes freak out about cars in adjacent lanes and slow down more than it should.

Our Volvo V40 saved our butt once on the highway. Late at night, cars piling up all of a sudden in front of us. The car slammed the brakes and stopped us a few meters away from the car in front :-)

I also have a V40 and have also had an experience exactly like that on a motorway - bright red lights flashed at the bottom of the windscreen along to a warning sound and the autonomous braking kicked in and stopped me from hitting the car in front. Excellent system.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#579

Post by StylusEater »

Why don’t we introduce some of the same requirements for drivers as we have for private pilots (think traditional bi-annual flight reviews)? Not only would we most likely reduce fatalities, accidents and injuries but we’d probably also eliminate many unsafe drivers from the road while placing a forcing function on public transit to increase usage. We’d probably also see a knock on effect to the training market and increase employment in that field. We might also see an increase in tax/fee income for government entities to help reduce reliance on gasoline taxes. Obviously I haven’t done a rigorous analysis but it would seem like a win all around in my humble opinion.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#580

Post by reallydontask »

Klathmon wrote: post #544
reallydontask wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they truly believe that the autopilot driving is safer than unassisted, they might reasonably consider it an immoral act not to ship it. Then Tesla should be given it away, not charging extra for it. To do otherwise would be immoral.

They do. Autopilot is standard in every single car Tesla sells now, for exactly this reason. Here is the blog post on their website where they talk about making it standard: https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-our-vehicle-lineup

As well as bundling it prices have been bumped up, to me that is not giving it away for free.
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