U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes • Hacker News Board

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#151

Post by robomartin » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 2:31 PM UTC

TacticalCoder wrote: post #27

I drive a lot across Europe: as in, really a lot, long trip across several countries, several times a year. I drive enough on the highways to know a few scary situations, like the truck driver in a big curve slightly deviating out of his lane and "pushing" me dangerously close to the median strip for example. To me driving requires paying constant attention to the road and being always ready to act swiftly: I just do…

It is my belief that the most ideal form of truly self driving vehicles will not happen until a time when vehicles can talk to each other on the road to make each other aware of position and speed data. I don't think this has to be full GPS coordinates at all. This is about short range relative position information.

A mesh network of vehicles on the road would add the ability for vehicles to become aware of far more than a human driver can ever know. For example, if cars become aware of a problem a few km/miles ahead, they can all adjust speed way before encountering the constriction in order to optimize for traffic flow (or safety, etc.).

Of course, this does not adequately deal with pedestrians, bikes, pets, fallen trees, debris on the road, etc.

Not saying cars would exclusively use the mesh network as the sole method for navigation, they have to be highly capable without it. The mesh network would be an enhancement layer. On highways this would allow for optimization that would bring forth some potentially nice benefits. For example, I can envision reducing emissions through traffic flow optimization.

Remember that electric cars still produce emissions, just not necessarily directly while driving. The energy has to come from somewhere and, unless we build a massive number of nuclear plants, that somewhere will likely include a significant percentage of coal and natural gas power plants.

The timeline for this utopia is likely in the 20+ year range. I say this because of the simple reality of car and truck ownership. People who are buying cars today are not going to dispose of them in ten years. A car that is new today will likely enter into the used market in 8 to 10 years and be around another 5 to 10. The situation is different with commercial vehicles. Commercial trucks tend to have longer service lives by either design or maintenance. So, yeah, 20 to 30 years seems reasonable.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#152

Post by sandworm101 » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 2:32 PM UTC

CrazyStat wrote: post #115

sandworm101 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why not flip the scheme. Instead of have the human as backup to the machine, make the machine backup the human. Let the human do all the driving and have the robot jump in whenever the human makes a mistake. Telemetry can then record all the situations where the human and the machine disagreed. That should provide all the necessary data, with the benefit of the robot perhaps preventing many accidents. Of course…

> Want safety? How about a Tesla that is electronically incapable of speeding. That would be unsafe in many situations. If the flow of traffic is substantially above the speed limit--which it often is--being unable to match it increases the risk of accident. This is known as the Solomon curve [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_curve

Ok. Electronically incapable of driving more than 10% faster than other traffic.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#153

Post by hn8788 » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 2:34 PM UTC

andreilys wrote: post #148

paul7986 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully automated Self driving cars is either a pipe dream or decades away in which many more people will be killed on the road in the name of technological progress.

which many more people will be killed on the rise in the name of technological progress. Seeing as car crashes are the leading cause of deaths from people aged 1-54, it may be an improvement from the status quo More than 38,000 people die every year in crashes on U.S. roadways. The U.S. traffic fatality rate is 12.4 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. An additional 4.4 million are injured seriously enough to require medi…

I'd say it depends on how many of those deaths are caused by the driver doing something unsafe. I'd be more comfortable with higher traffic deaths that primarily affect bad drivers than a lower number of deaths randomly spread across all drivers by a blackbox algorithm.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#154

Post by ra7 » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 2:34 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #149

ra7 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully autonomous cars are already a reality with Waymo in AZ and AutoX, Baidu in China. I don't know how safe the Chinese companies are, but Waymo's safety record [1] is nothing short of stellar. [1] https://waymo.com/safety

Good for Waymo and hopefully Google keeps up this science project. But it's a very limited and almost as perfect an environment as you could have outside of a controlled test area. Those who were saying L4/5 would be decades at least away seem to be those who were on the right track. Kids growing up today are going to have to learn to drive.

L5 may be decades away. I think we will see L4 in some major metro areas in the US by end of this decade. SF is heating up with Cruise and Waymo's heavy testing. Their progress will be a great indicator for true city driving.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#155

Post by hcurtiss » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #99

fzzzy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you hate regular cruise control? How is that not partial self driving?

To tell you the truth, I generally do and haven't used it for ages. Where I drive, the roads have some amount of traffic. I find (traditional) cruise control encourages driving at a constant speed to a degree that I wouldn't as a driver with a foot on the gas. So I don't "hate" regular cruise control but I basically never use it.

I think you are in a distinct minority.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#156

Post by treesknees » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

CrazyStat wrote: post #115

sandworm101 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why not flip the scheme. Instead of have the human as backup to the machine, make the machine backup the human. Let the human do all the driving and have the robot jump in whenever the human makes a mistake. Telemetry can then record all the situations where the human and the machine disagreed. That should provide all the necessary data, with the benefit of the robot perhaps preventing many accidents. Of course…

> Want safety? How about a Tesla that is electronically incapable of speeding. That would be unsafe in many situations. If the flow of traffic is substantially above the speed limit--which it often is--being unable to match it increases the risk of accident. This is known as the Solomon curve [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_curve

> Subsequent research suggests significant biases in the Solomon study, which may cast doubt on its findings

With the logic presented in the theoretical foundation section, it seems that the safer move would actually be slow down and match the speed of all the trucks and other large vehicles... which won't happen.

Matching speed sounds great, except there are always people willing to go faster and faster. In my state they raised the speed limit from 70 to 75, it just means more people are going 85-90. How is that safer?

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#157

Post by ocdtrekkie » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

ra7 wrote: post #138

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo selected the one state willing to entirely remove any safety reporting requirements for self-driving cars as the place to launch their service. Regardless of what they claim to the contrary, if they had confidence in their safety record, they would've launched it in California, not Arizona. Waymo has lied about the capabilities of their technology regularly, and for that reason alone, should be assumed unsafe.…

> Regardless of what they claim to the contrary, if they had confidence in their safety record, they would've launched it in California, not Arizona. California only months ago opened up permits for paid robotaxi rides. So no, they couldn't have launched it in CA. If you've noticed, they actually are testing in SF with a permit. > Waymo has lied about the capabilities of their technology regularly, and for that reaso…

I recall a particular incident where Waymo was marketing their car being able to drive a blind man to a drive-thru, way before the thing could safely drive more than a mile on it's own. My understanding is that in 2021, it still can't navigate parking lots (which would preclude using it for drive-thrus).

Later, they were talking about how sophisticated their technology was: It can detect the hand signals of someone directing traffic in the middle of an intersection. Funny that a few months later, a journalist got an admission out of a Waymo engineer that the car wouldn't even stop at a stoplight unless the stoplight was explicitly mapped (with centimeter-level precision) so the car knew to look for it and where to look for the signal.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/08/28/171520/hidden-ob...

The article is seven years old at this point, but it's also incredibly humbling in how much bull- Waymo puts out, especially compared to the impressions their marketing team puts out. (Urmson's son presumably has a driver's license by now.)

In at least one scenario, the former Waymo engineer upset he had failed to kill anyone yet ("I’m pissed we didn’t have the first death"), caused a hit-and-run accident with a Waymo car, and didn't report it to authorities, amongst other serious accidents: https://www.salon.com/2018/10/16/googles-self-driving-cars-i... Said star Waymo engineer eventually went to prison for stealing trade secrets and then got pardoned by Donald Trump. Google didn't fire him for trying to kill people, they only really got upset with him because he took their tech to Uber.

I'd say Waymo has a storied history of dishonesty and coverups, behind a technology that's more or less a remote control car that only runs in a narrow group of carefully premapped streets.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#158

Post by Retric » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 2:39 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #111

KronisLV wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But how can you react promptly if you're not ready? I just don't get this. You cannot, that's the simple truth. You're supposed to focus on the road anyways and should be able to take over once any sort of autopilot or assist system starts working erroneously, yet in practice many people simply assume that those systems being there in the first place mean that you can simply stop focusing on the road altogether. It…

It's nothing (well certainly not everything) to do with people's assumptions. There's a ton of research around how people simply stop paying attention when there's no reason for them to pay attention 99% of the time. It doesn't even need to be about them pulling out a book or watching a movie. It can simply be zoning out. Maybe, as you say, it's feasible today or soon to better handle brief distractions but once you…

We have empirical data showing how safe actual level 2 self driving cars are in practice. So there’s no reason to work from base assumptions. Yes, level 2 self driving cars cause avoidable accidents, but overall rate is very close to the rate people do. The only way that’s happing is they are causing and preventing roughly similar numbers of accidents.

Which means people are either paying enough attention or these self driving systems are quite good. My suspicion is it’s a mix of both, where people tend to zone out in less hazardous driving conditions and start paying attention when things start looking dangerous. Unfortunately, that’s going to cause an equilibrium where people pay less attention as these systems get better.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#159

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

TacticalCoder wrote: post #27

I drive a lot across Europe: as in, really a lot, long trip across several countries, several times a year. I drive enough on the highways to know a few scary situations, like the truck driver in a big curve slightly deviating out of his lane and "pushing" me dangerously close to the median strip for example. To me driving requires paying constant attention to the road and being always ready to act swiftly: I just do…

[deleted]

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#160

Post by ghaff » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

ra7 wrote: post #154

ghaff wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for Waymo and hopefully Google keeps up this science project. But it's a very limited and almost as perfect an environment as you could have outside of a controlled test area. Those who were saying L4/5 would be decades at least away seem to be those who were on the right track. Kids growing up today are going to have to learn to drive.

L5 may be decades away. I think we will see L4 in some major metro areas in the US by end of this decade. SF is heating up with Cruise and Waymo's heavy testing. Their progress will be a great indicator for true city driving.

>we will see L4 in some major metro areas in the US by end of this decade

I think you're far more likely to see L4 on limited access highways in good weather. A robotaxi service in a major city seems much more problematic given all the random behavior by other cars, pedestrians, cyclists, etc. and picking up/dropping off people in the fairly random ways that taxis/Ubers do. (And you'll rightly be shut down 6 months for an investigation the first time you run over someone even if they weren't crossing at a crosswalk.)

And for many people, including myself, automated highway driving would actually be a much bigger win than urban taxi rides which I rarely have a need for.