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

#411

Post by jumpkick » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 10:34 PM UTC

bit_logic wrote: post #385

Animats wrote: post #302

Right. As I've pointed out previously, Tesla seems to be unable to detect sizable stationary obstacles that are partly blocking a lane, especially if they don't look like the rear end of a car. In addition to emergency vehicles, Teslas on autopilot have plowed into freeway barriers and a street sweeper. That's the usual situation for first responders, who usually try to block as little of the road as possible but oft…

I think we need to add a new level 2 assisted driving skills section to driving tests. Level 2 can be safer but it really requires understanding how level 2 works and limitations. For example, when I use level 2 (mine is Honda but applies to other level 2 as well since they mostly share the same vendor), these are the rules I follow: - Car switching in/out of my lane, I manually take over - Tight curve in the freeway…

If level 2 requires such handholding, what’s the point? Seems to me like it just leads to a false sense of security, giving drivers the feeling that they can trust the self-driving system a lot more than they safely can.

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

#412

Post by asdff » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 10:36 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #276

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 s…

I think that's pretty reckless honestly, you put a lot of faith in the system being able to detect lane markers. Other than that I could see how adaptive cruise control can be nice, but it's also not hard to engage cruise control and fine tune your speed to the conditions by tapping up or down on the buttons on the wheel.

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

#413

Post by jeofken » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 10:37 PM UTC

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…

During the 3 years I’ve owned it there are 2 places where lines are wonky and I know to take over.

I have not yet struggled to stay alert when it drives me, and it has driven better than I would have - so it certainly is an improvement over me driving 100% of the time. It does not have road rage and it does not enjoy the feeling of speeding, like I do when I drive, nor does it feel like driving is a competition, like I must admit I do when I am hungry, stressed, or tired.

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

No way I’d buy a car that does not accelerate when I hit the pedal. Would you buy a machine that is not your servant?

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

#414

Post by shrimpx » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #302

Right. As I've pointed out previously, Tesla seems to be unable to detect sizable stationary obstacles that are partly blocking a lane, especially if they don't look like the rear end of a car. In addition to emergency vehicles, Teslas on autopilot have plowed into freeway barriers and a street sweeper. That's the usual situation for first responders, who usually try to block as little of the road as possible but oft…

Elon keeps warning the world about the impending hyperintelligent AI that will retool human economies, politics, and religions, yet year after year his cobbled-together AI fails at basic object detection.

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

#415

Post by asdff » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

beambot wrote: post #275

Johnny555 wrote: post #258

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 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 th…

GPS is extremely accurate honestly. My garmen adjusts itself the very instant I cross over a speed limit sign to a new speed, somehow. Maybe they have good metadata, but its all public anyway under some department of transportation domain and probably not hard to mine with the price of compute these days. Even just setting a top speed in residential areas of like 35mph would be good and save a lot of lives that are lost when pedestrians meet cars traveling at 50mph. A freeway presents a good opportunity to add sensors to the limited on and off ramps for the car to detect that its on a freeway. Many freeways already have some sort of sensor based system for charging fees.

What would be even easier than all of that, though, is just installing speeding cameras and mailing tickets.

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

#416

Post by shrimpx » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 10:45 PM UTC

quartesixte wrote: post #408

asdff wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how its even possible for these cars to be crashing. My car beeps like a missile is locked on when I am coming too close to an object I might hit. Just a simple sensor in the front. If my car can beep and give me enough time to slam on the brakes, why can't Tesla's do the same?

Well for starters, they’re taking out the radars that other cars rely on to accomplish this.

In other parts of this thread, people are suggesting that these crashes are the radar's fault and deploying their vision-only system will fix the problem.

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

#417

Post by thebruce87m » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 10:46 PM UTC

bob33212 wrote: post #68

sidibe wrote: post #23

Glad the regulators are looking into this. It bothers me that now Tesla seems to have no liability at all for the system not working, since it's always the driver's fault for not paying enough attention. As Teslas get better at driving the drivers will be paying less attention inevitably, Tesla needs to start being responsible at some point

Every year young drivers die because they were inexperienced and didn't realize they were going too fast to too slow for a certain situation. Once full self driving is statistically safer than humans how will you not let people use it? It is like saying you would rather have 10 children die because of bad driving skills rather than 1 child die because they were not paying attention at all times.

Just statistically safer won’t cut it - it will have to me many orders of magnitude safer. Instead of drunk people and mobile phone users dying it will be random accidents that humans would easily have avoided but is some weird edge case for the ML model. It’ll be a cars plowing down kids on trikes on a clear day, all captured in perfect HD on the cars cameras and in the press the next day with the crying driver blaming the car.

That’ll be a hard thing to overcome for the public. The drunk person “had it coming”, but did little Timmy?

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

#418

Post by HALtheWise » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 10:51 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #405

Animats wrote: post #302

Right. As I've pointed out previously, Tesla seems to be unable to detect sizable stationary obstacles that are partly blocking a lane, especially if they don't look like the rear end of a car. In addition to emergency vehicles, Teslas on autopilot have plowed into freeway barriers and a street sweeper. That's the usual situation for first responders, who usually try to block as little of the road as possible but oft…

I don't understand how its even possible for these cars to be crashing. My car beeps like a missile is locked on when I am coming too close to an object I might hit. Just a simple sensor in the front. If my car can beep and give me enough time to slam on the brakes, why can't Tesla's do the same?

You're probably referring to parking sensors, which are typically ultrasonic sensors mounted to the bumpers. Unfortunately, ultrasonics have both a limited range of ~20ft for practical uses, and more damningly, a relatively wide field of view with no ability to distinguish where in the field of view an object is. While 20ft range is more than enough to give you time to slam on the brakes in your garage, it's basically useless for high speed autonomy, except for some very limited blindspot-awareness type tasks.

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

#419

Post by pkulak » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 10:57 PM UTC

postmeta wrote: post #346

Animats wrote: post #302

Right. As I've pointed out previously, Tesla seems to be unable to detect sizable stationary obstacles that are partly blocking a lane, especially if they don't look like the rear end of a car. In addition to emergency vehicles, Teslas on autopilot have plowed into freeway barriers and a street sweeper. That's the usual situation for first responders, who usually try to block as little of the road as possible but oft…

As this reddit post pointed out, this appears to be a common problem with radar TACC. https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/p5ekci/us_agen... """ These events occur typically when a vehicle is partially in a lane and radar has to ignore a stationary object. This is pretty standard and inherent with TACC + radar. The faster Tesla pushes the vision only stack to all cars after they’ve validated the data, the fa…

I’ll believe it when I see it. From what I can tell, Tesla has made no progress at all in three years. I just drove my buddy’s 3, and it was still diving to the right when a lane merges and the line disappears. This drove me nuts when I test drove years ago. Other cars do lane keeping so much better than Tesla at this point.

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

#420

Post by MichaelZuo » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 10:59 PM UTC

Drunk_Engineer wrote: post #292

tomdell wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that partial self driving is an irresponsible product not because it's impossible to drive safely with it, but because so many people will use it as an excuse to pay little to no attention to the road. If you personally are a responsible driver and even a better driver with it, that's great - but most people probably aren't going to use it the same way, especially those without much of an understanding…

The technical term for this is Risk Compensation: "Risk compensation is a theory which suggests that people typically adjust their behavior in response to perceived levels of risk, becoming more careful where they sense greater risk and less careful if they feel more protected."

Also moral hazard, kinda.