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

reuters.com

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

#271

Post by jazzyjackson »

_ph_ wrote: post #172
hn8788 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you are texting while driving and hit a stopped car or run a red light, you are very lightly to kill others. Actually more likely, as a side impact is more dangerous than a frontal one.

But the car doesn’t need to drive itself to avoid those factors, it just needs to have radar auto braking

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

#272

Post by ohazi »

alistairSH wrote: post #109
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…

Nobody is going to buy a car that will randomly make its own decisions, that will pull the wheel from your hands ever time it thinks you are making an illegal lane change. That's almost exactly what my Honda does. Illegal (no signal) lane change results in a steering wheel shaker (and optional audio alert). And the car, when sensing an abrupt swerve which is interpreted as the vehicle leaving the roadway, attempts to…

> That's almost exactly what my Honda does. Illegal (no signal) lane change results in a steering wheel shaker (and optional audio alert). And the car, when sensing an abrupt swerve which is interpreted as the vehicle leaving the roadway, attempts to correct that via steering and brake inputs.

By the way, this is fucking terrifying when you first encounter it in a rental car on a dark road with poor lane markings while just trying to get to your hotel after a five hour flight.

I didn't encounter an obvious wheel shaker, but this psychotic car was just yanking the wheel in different directions as I was trying to merge onto a highway.

Must be what a malfunctioning MCAS felt like in a 737 MAX, but thankfully without the hundreds of pounds of hydraulic force.

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

#273

Post by marvin »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #208
judge2020 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current TACC/auto-steer doesn’t use deep learning except on the newest Model 3/Y vehicles with “TeslaVision”. All cars with radar use the radar and radar only to determine if they should stop for the following car.

How does TeslaVision work with stationary objects at night? Like say a big ass truck with its lights off? Do you just pray the vision system recognizes “something” is there? I know they want to pursue a pure-vision system with no radar input, but it seems like there will be some crazy low light / low visibility edge cases you’d have to deal with.

How does a human detect a big ass truck with its lights off at night? This is solvable with computer vision. Tesla's dataset is almost nothing but edge cases, and they keep adding more all the time. My money says they'll get there.

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

#274

Post by tablespoon »

sandworm101 wrote: post #74
Robotbeat wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually disagree. (And before you respond, please read my post because it’s not a trivial point.) The fact that an huge formal investigation happened with just a single casualty is proof that it may actually be superior for safety in the long-term (when combined with feedback from regulators and government investigators). One death in conventional vehicles is irrelevant. But because of the high profile of Tesla’s…

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…

> Of course this is impossible in the real world. Nobody is going to buy a car that will randomly make its own decisions, that will pull the wheel from your hands ever time it thinks you are making an illegal lane change.

Yeah, add to that the unreliability of Tesla's system means that it cannot pull the wheel from the driver, because it's not unusual for it to want to do something dangerous and need to be stopped. You don't want it to "fix" a mistake by driving someone into the median divider.

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

#275

Post by beambot »

Johnny555 wrote: post #258
jeofken wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On most or all roads below 100km/h autopilot won’t allow speeding, and therefore I drive at the limit, which I know I would not have done if I controlled it. It also stays in the lane better than I do, keeps distance better, and more. Sometimes it’s wonky when the street lines are unclear. It’s not perfect but a better driver than I am in 80% of cases. My insurance company gives a lower rate if you buy the full autop…

On most or all roads below 100km/h autopilot won’t allow speeding, and therefore I drive at the limit, which I know I would not have done if I controlled it If following the speed limit makes cars safer, another way to achieve that without autopilot is to just have all cars limit their speed to the speed limit. Sometimes it’s wonky when the street lines are unclear. It’s not perfect but a better driver than I am in 8…

> just have all cars limit their speed to the speed limit.

The devil is in the details... GPS may not provide sufficient resolution. Construction zones. School zones with variable hours. Tunnels. Adverse road conditions. Changes to the underlying roads. Different classes of vehicles. Etc.

By the time you account for all the mapping and/or perception, you could've just improved the autonomous driving and eliminated the biggest source of humans driving: The human.

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

#276

Post by jedberg »

A lot of people in here saying it is not possible to drive safely with partial self driving. I wonder, how many of those people have actually driven a car with autopilot?

I have autopilot on my car, and it definitely makes me a better and safer driver. It maintains my distance from the car in front and my speed while keeping me in my lane, so my brain no longer has to worry about those mundane things. Instead I can spend all my brainpower focused on looking for potential emergencies, instead of splitting time between lane keeping/following and looking for emergencies.

I no longer have to look at my speedometer or the lane markers, I can take a much broader view of the traffic and conditions around me.

Before you say it's impossible to be safe driving with an assistive product, I suggest trying one out.

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

#277

Post by MR4D »

gundmc wrote: post #3

This 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.

A car that beeps when I drift out of lane, or beeps when I go too fast before a curve, or beeps like hell if I cross over the center median would be hugely useful, because a record of every warning would be there, whether correct or not.

Conversely, if it didn't warn me right before an accident, then the absence of that warning would be useful too.

All of that information should be put back into the model based on crash reporting. Everything else can be ignored.

I would argue that the information should be available to all automakers (perhaps using the NHTSA as a conduit), so that each of them have the same safety information, but can still develop their own models. The FAA actually does this already with the FAA Accident and Incident Data Systems [0] and it has worked pretty darn well.

[0] - https://www.asias.faa.gov/apex/f?p=100:2:::NO:::

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

#278

Post by xeromal »

phoe18 wrote: post #4

> "The involved subject vehicles were all confirmed to have been engaged in either Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control during the approach to the crashes," No mention of the deceptive marketing name "Full Self Driving" in the article.

I'm pretty sure because FSD is out to a limited number of users at the moment. I think it totals around a 1000.

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

#279

Post by [deleted] »

SCNP wrote: post #123
kelvin0 wrote: post #75

Having human drivers and assisted drivers on the same road is problematic currently. I think the best situation would be to have 'automated' stretches of highway specially designed to 'help' self driving systems. Only self driving vehicles would be allowed on such special highways, and everything would be built around such systems.

Let me preface by saying that I hold no strong opinions on this matter and my comments are purely speculative. This is kind of a position I've held for a long time but a different aspect of the problem. I think a system similar to IFF in aircraft would solve all of these issue. If every car knew where every other car was at all times, you could easily devise a system that would be nearly flawless. The issue is, there…

[deleted]

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

#280

Post by jeffbee »

guerby wrote: post #184

There 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…

You can't really make the comparison between the entire US fleet and Tesla alone. All Teslas are newer than the median car in the fleet, and Tesla owners are self-selected among wealthy people, because the cars are pretty expensive. The IIHS says that deaths per million vehicle-years among midsize luxury cars is 20. There are many cars where no driver died in a given year, for example the Mercedes C-class "4matic" sedan .
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