Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tesla is ordered to turn over Autopilot data to a federal safety agency

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 192 posts

Re: Tesla is ordered to turn over Autopilot data to a federal safety agency

#91

Post by SerLava »

simion314 wrote: post #80
lftl wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find the specific comment now, but on previous autonomous driving discussions here, it's been asserted that Tesla (and many other systems) simply can't reliably detect stationary objects at speed. If the systems actually did a naive, "that looks like a stationary object, I'm going to avoid it" they'd barely be able to move in a highway setting.

There are systems that can detect stationary objects, Tesla does not want to use those more reliable systems, so they use the programming methodology of tweaking tweaking the code when a bug appears and hope that was the last one. Sure some AI gurus will claim that humans can detect this objects only with 2 eyes but they forget to mention that behind those 2 eyes is a brain an actual intelligence that is aware of the…

Yeah they want a low unit cost on the camera system, so they are trying to machine learn their way out of the problem. It's not going to work.

A self driving system needs to have a 3d understanding of it's environment. It's not acceptable to crash into paintings by Wile E. Coyote.

Re: Tesla is ordered to turn over Autopilot data to a federal safety agency

#92

Post by madamelic »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #82
lftl wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find the specific comment now, but on previous autonomous driving discussions here, it's been asserted that Tesla (and many other systems) simply can't reliably detect stationary objects at speed. If the systems actually did a naive, "that looks like a stationary object, I'm going to avoid it" they'd barely be able to move in a highway setting.

If that's the case, the correct solution is to shut Autopilot and all systems like it down, and charge their developers with reckless endangerment. A autonomous driving system which can't detect stationary obstacles is not an autonomous driving system: It's a murder machine. If they can't do this, they shouldn't operate, full stop.

The horrible truth is that if autonomous driving can save 1+ life, it's better than what we have now so we should keep it and accept that crashes will occur much like they do now with humans in sole control.

There's no reason to kill autonomous driving just because gen 1 - 50 isn't perfect but is an improvement on current driving methodology.

Giving a one-line sentence of what happened disregards other variables such as, lighting conditions, where the stationary object was (Over a hill, round a sharp bend, etc.), how much stopping distance was there. A lot of Tesla hate is purposefully done from EV haters & Musk haters. No one can argue that there isn't an establishment who wants to tear down and prevent Tesla & Musk from succeeding. Teslas will catch on fire (like other cars do), Teslas will crash (like other cars do), Auto-pilot will fail (while also being overall an improvement on driving safety).

We can't assume the stationary object was 300 feet away on a straightaway in a perfect visibility conditions, we have to judge whether a human would've performed worse and whether the same cases are occurring over and over. 12 crashes over a few months is a pretty tiny fraction when there are probably more than 12 humans crashing into stationary objects every hour.

Re: Tesla is ordered to turn over Autopilot data to a federal safety agency

#93

Post by mcguire »

matt123456789 wrote: post #76
duxup wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect humans are really bad when they only have to sorta pay attention and it results in just not paying attention a great deal of the time. I'm not sure that's fixable on the human end.

The question is, how much of that is Tesla’s fault? They’re an EV company, not a psychology consultancy. We don’t hold gun manufacturers or alcohol companies liable when people do stupid things with their products, despite the best efforts of their marketing divisions. Granted “pull trigger get bullet” is much simpler than the Autopilot response.

What happens if the liability belongs entirely to the customer?

I suspect insurance would be quite expensive.

Re: Tesla is ordered to turn over Autopilot data to a federal safety agency

#94

Post by whoknowswhat11 »

yardie wrote: post #50
brk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just did a 1,500 mile round-trip journey to visit family. Because of the Tesla stuff, I was casually aware of roadside emergency vehicles moreso than usual. We passed 28 police/fire/emergency vehicles that were next to our travel lane. I saw a number of Tesla vehicles on the road as well, each passing these same emergency vehicles, but not always in the same lane. By this point, there must be 1M+ incidents of Tesl…

I'm sorry but the general computer called your brain is not like the purposebuilt computer of Autopilot. 12 is too many for a computer who's only job is to literally look at the road and drive.

The NHTSA has been very unclear about how many of these were on autopilot vs cruise control.

Re: Tesla is ordered to turn over Autopilot data to a federal safety agency

#95

Post by jerf »

joelwilliamson wrote: post #83
jerf wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, and many others, take the position that there really isn't any practical gradation between more-or-less conventional driving, maybe with light lane switching assistance or something, and full on "Level 5" autonomous driving, because the idea that human brains can watch something for hours at a time only to take instant, sub-second actions every few hours is an insane model of human cognition. I don't disagree with…

Shouldn't the objection be to anything less than Level 4, rather than Level 5? Level 4 requires that the vehicle can safely stop itself and wait for a human to take over when it is faced with a situation it can't handle. (There's an argument that if you take away the routine parts of driving, humans won't be able to deal with anomalous situations, but that's a different argument than the attentiveness one.)

If that is possible, yes. I'm not convinced it is possible to create an autonomous vehicle that only panics in situations where there is a safe pull-over, or, if such a vehicle exists, that it'll be considered "autonomous" when it can't go past 25 or 35 mph or something. There's plenty of driving situations that may be confusing where pulling over and stopping isn't possible.

(And, to be clear, I'm not asking for perfect safety, I'm asking for "human or better", and also understand that there may be some interesting fuzziness near the border where the two have different strengths and weakenesses but come out statistically the same. However, I don't feel like we're there yet.)

Re: Tesla is ordered to turn over Autopilot data to a federal safety agency

#97

Post by Spare_account »

tw04 wrote: post #45
brk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just did a 1,500 mile round-trip journey to visit family. Because of the Tesla stuff, I was casually aware of roadside emergency vehicles moreso than usual. We passed 28 police/fire/emergency vehicles that were next to our travel lane. I saw a number of Tesla vehicles on the road as well, each passing these same emergency vehicles, but not always in the same lane. By this point, there must be 1M+ incidents of Tesl…

>I saw a number of Tesla vehicles on the road as well, each passing these same emergency vehicles, but not always in the same lane. How do you know all of them were on autopilot? >12 crashes is 12 crashes too many, statistically speaking, but it's also a tiny tiny percentage of the total number of cases. It's also 12 more than any normal attentive human has gotten into, and an average attentive human driver is the ab…

>It's also 12 more than any normal attentive human has gotten into

Can you clarify this please? Are you asserting that prior to the 12 Tesla incidents, there weren't any crashes into stationary emergency vehicles?

Re: Tesla is ordered to turn over Autopilot data to a federal safety agency

#98

Post by CultMember001 »

Is this only for Autopilot data or also for Full Self Driving data? Hasn't Full Self Driving already passed all approvals and perfectly safe? Why would they try to regulate something that is already perfectly safe? I have never heard of Full Self Driving crashing. I think Tesla should charge more for this advanced tech. I think $5000/month/car is a fairer price.

Re: Tesla is ordered to turn over Autopilot data to a federal safety agency

#99

Post by ghaff »

Spare_account wrote: post #97
tw04 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I saw a number of Tesla vehicles on the road as well, each passing these same emergency vehicles, but not always in the same lane. How do you know all of them were on autopilot? >12 crashes is 12 crashes too many, statistically speaking, but it's also a tiny tiny percentage of the total number of cases. It's also 12 more than any normal attentive human has gotten into, and an average attentive human driver is the ab…

>It's also 12 more than any normal attentive human has gotten into Can you clarify this please? Are you asserting that prior to the 12 Tesla incidents, there weren't any crashes into stationary emergency vehicles?

No, he's asserting that a normal attentive driver won't crash into a stationary emergency vehicle under remotely normal weather/road conditions. And, personally, I'm not going to trust a system that isn't as good as a normal attentive driver.

Re: Tesla is ordered to turn over Autopilot data to a federal safety agency

#100

Post by fallingknife »

simion314 wrote: post #84
fallingknife wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely a good reason for adaptove cruise control systems to ignore stationary objects: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/06/why-emergency-braking-s...

The reason is "our code is too stupid, because is not an actual intelligence and better sensors are expensive"? This is a bad reason from my point of view. You claim that you have some super duper AI but it can't detect a truck or a wall from a shadow or bag , then your AI is stupid and buy some better sensors and improve your AI.

> our code is too stupid, because is not an actual intelligence

Well you don't ask for much

Post reply on HN