The Tesla FSD beta is what we all dreamed of in the 90s. It’s mind blowing. Its so crazy that it’s finally arrived, though not able to fully and reliably drive itself in every circumstance, and nobody seems to care. People only seem to be foaming at the mouth about the way way the product is labeled. If HN found the holy grail but it was labeled “un-holy grail” then HN would apparently chuck it over their shoulder.
U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes
261–270 of 507 posts
Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes
#262Seeing all the near-misses and life saving interventions on YouTube involving Tesla vehicles, 1 death seems not such a bad result.. The question should be - how many lives were saved by this system vs how many would die if driven "normally"?
>The question should be - how many lives were saved by this system vs how many would die if driven "normally"?
It is also necessary to project this into the future, i.e. looking at the integral of expected lives lost 'rushing' self driving cars vs. 'waiting-and-seeing' (as Americans die at a rate of 40,000 per annum).
If twice as many people die for a fixed number of years to create a self driving system that results in half the fatality rate of the status quo, that becomes worth it very, very quickly.
Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes
#263There is about 36000 death on the road per year in the USA for 280 millions vehicles, that's 128.5 death/million vehicule/year If we assume the number of tesla autopilot death double this year to 8 (from 4 at the time of probe launch), for about 900 thousand tesla on the road in USA, that's 8.9 autopilot death/million tesla/year. Ratio between the numbers of 14.4. Tesla reporting says for Q1 2021 one crash on autopil…
> I was shocked that in the USA in 2019 about 40-46% of all road death people were unbelted, while 90% of front seat people wear seat belts according to observation studies.
Doesn't that just speak to the effectiveness of seatbelts? Most people wear them, and two-fifths of those who died in a crash did not wear a seatbelt.
If we had the same proportion of deaths as we have seatbelt wearers, that would indicate the belts are ineffective.
Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
I drive a Tesla and don't use the self-steering feature exactly because of this. What I do instead is enable the warnings from the same software like the ones you describe. That is actually a large gain. I'm already paying attention as I'm driving the car at all times and the software helps me catch things I haven't noticed for some reason. Those features seem really well done as the false positives are not too frequ…
Does it have/use emergency braking in case of danger, if you don't use self-driving?
Yes but they are phasing out radar in favor of vision-only. Model 3 and Y have been shipping without radar braking for the past few months.
Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
People are going faster because they felt it's safer, not because of the speed limit. You can design roads that cause humans to slow down and be more careful.
Or you can just set the speed limit appropriately, in accordance with sound engineering principles. A radical notion, I guess.
Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are in a distinct minority.
Maybe a fairly small sample size but I don't know the last time I've been in a car where the driver has turned on cruise control. But it probably varies by area of the country. In the Northeast, there's just enough traffic in general that it's not worth it for me.
In traffic is where traffic aware cruise control is most useful. A lot of people I knew who bought Tesla's in the bay area specifically bought it so their commutes would be less stressful with the bumper to bumper traffic. I drove 3000+ miles across the country last year with > 90% of it on AP and I was way less tired with AP on vs off and it allowed me to just stay focused on the road and look out for any issues.
Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes
#267Unfortunately the article doesn't mention anything about how common it is for human drivers to crash into first responder vehicles during the night. I'm not trying to downplay these cases, as hitting emergency vehicles is very bad indeed, yet ~4 such crashes per year might be in the same ballpark or even better than "unassisted" drivers that cause such crashes.
Indeed! I was looking for the same comparison.
In Canada the Highway Act states that you must move over (change lanes) for stopped emergency vehicles. It seems to solve that problem gracefully, leaving an empty lane between the stopped vehicles and traffic.
Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes
#268Unfortunately the article doesn't mention anything about how common it is for human drivers to crash into first responder vehicles during the night. I'm not trying to downplay these cases, as hitting emergency vehicles is very bad indeed, yet ~4 such crashes per year might be in the same ballpark or even better than "unassisted" drivers that cause such crashes.
Might be around 98 a year if this[1] is the correct list. Edit: I think the page count at the bottom of that list is off, it seems to repeat the last page so it might be less. [1] https://www.respondersafety.com/news/struck-by-incidents/?da...
Considering that less than 0.3% of cars in the US are Teslas and that - I would guess - less than 10% of them are using autopilot at any given time - they are likely 100s of times more likely to hit first responders.
Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes
#269There is about 36000 death on the road per year in the USA for 280 millions vehicles, that's 128.5 death/million vehicule/year If we assume the number of tesla autopilot death double this year to 8 (from 4 at the time of probe launch), for about 900 thousand tesla on the road in USA, that's 8.9 autopilot death/million tesla/year. Ratio between the numbers of 14.4. Tesla reporting says for Q1 2021 one crash on autopil…
> I was shocked that in the USA in 2019 about 40-46% of all road death people were unbelted, while 90% of front seat people wear seat belts according to observation studies. Doesn't that just speak to the effectiveness of seatbelts? Most people wear them, and two-fifths of those who died in a crash did not wear a seatbelt. If we had the same proportion of deaths as we have seatbelt wearers, that would indicate the be…
Assuming that belted and unbelted people get into accidents at the same rate, and given another commenter mentioning that Autopilot users have 8.7x lower accident rate than baseline, that makes Autopilot a greater safety add than seat belts, no?
Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes
#270This is why I believe the approach of incremental improvement towards full self driving is fundamentally flawed. These advanced driver assist tools are good enough to lull users into a false sense of security. No amount of "but our terms and conditions say you need to always pay attention!" will overcome human nature building that trust and dependence.
I remember reading Donald Norman's books decades ago, and one of the prime examples of the dangers of automation in cars was adaptive cruise control- which would then suddenly accelerate forward in a now-clear off-ramp, surprising the heck out of the previously-complacent driver, and leading to accidents.
We've known for a very long time that this sort of automation/manual control handoff failure is a very big deal, and yet there seems to be an almost willful blindness from the manufacturers to address it in a meaningful way.