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

nytimes.com

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

#141

Post by gpm »

ghaff wrote: post #140
grondo4 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average driver thinks that they are a better driver than the average driver right?

While that is true, there are also people who don't drink and drive, don't text while driving, don't drive while overly fatigued, etc. So it's reasonable for those people to not want to use a system that's only as good as an "average" driver.

> So it's reasonable for those people to not want to use a system that's only as good as an "average" driver.

But... no one is forcing anyone to use this system. They elect to. Thus this is the wrong question, but rather if drivers should be given the option to use the system.

If anything it might be reasonable to infer that poor drivers are more likely to use this system, so the standard could plausibly be below that of an average driver while still improving overall safety.

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

#142

Post by SerLava »

simion314 wrote: post #109
SerLava wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From what I understand there is also some code that is there to ignore static objects because maybe are signs or bridges and the AI is too stupid. So you have bad sensors with bad code combo.

Yeah it's essentially impossible for the system to be good- the limitations force other limitations.

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

#143

Post by noslenwerdna »

meepmorp wrote: post #2

> The safety agency informed Tesla weeks ago that it was looking into the spate of crashes in which Tesla vehicles operating on Autopilot failed to detect stopped emergency vehicles with flashing lights. The regulator originally said it was looking into 11 such crashes. A 12th occurred on Saturday, when a Model 3 hit a police cruiser that had stopped behind a car that had broken down on an interstate in Orlando, Fla.…

Thanks for your honesty.

Hopefully the NHTSA is also going to investigate the many other cars with traffic aware cruise control, which have the same problem with stationary vehicles.

I was driving my Rav4 with TACC enabled, and it would have crashed into a column of stopped cars if I hadn't noticed in time and intervened.

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

#144

Post by nilstycho »

simion314 wrote: post #131
nilstycho wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are systems that can detect stationary objects, Tesla does not want to use those more reliable systems What systems are you referring to? Lidar and radar systems can't reliably detect stationary objects as hazards, because most of the world is stationary and consequently gets filtered out.

Filtering out is the problem that develoeprs/engineers should solve right? I can't accept the idea that the car can hit a wall because "our devs are too incompetent or we are to cheap to use better hardware" , a wall or a truck does not look like a bridge or a shadow or a sign, if the AI is too stupid then is not ready, even if is better then a drunk teen that drives a 15 years old car in some very specific situation…

Yes, in principle there are systems that could detect stationary hazards. But as far as I'm aware the best lidar and radar approaches are currently no better than Tesla's RGB approach. It seems that the AI is much more important than the sensor.

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

#145

Post by SerLava »

matt123456789 wrote: post #123
SerLava wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "doing a stupid thing" though Fundamentally any life form has a slower reaction when they have to notice an issue and start to take motor control. Versus already being in control and simply not causing the issue. They are not just "an EV company" they are making a guidance system for thousands of high speed metal death machines. They BETTER consult some psychologists. This is a really bizarre thing to say.

You either misread my comment or you’re attacking a straw man argument. I said “they’re not a psychology consultancy”, NOT “I hope they don’t consult psychologists”.

I didn't misread it at all.

1. You are trying to shift blame away from Tesla and onto the drivers

2. Tesla is doing the same thing by pretending not to understand the brains of carbon based life forms, hoping most people accept it on face value and don't think too hard.

Placing the issue on individual psychology: "why did this guy shoot his own head on purpose, why did this guy drive drunk"

instead of on fundamental human psychology: "oh surely the drivers will simply take over control instantly and without warning after staring straight and doing nothing for 2 hours"

...is the whole problem. They need to consult psychologists instead of crying that they aren't responsible for their own system design.

So it's entirely Tesla's fault. They aren't making cars for Lt. Commander Data. They're making cars for human beings

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

#146

Post by cptskippy »

lftl wrote: post #53
eganist wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm sorry, but how can you form an opinion so quickly?" It doesn't really matter. They're stationary objects; there's absolutely no reason, good or bad, for the algorithm to determine that the correct trajectory change is into the stationary object. Humans crash into stationary objects because they're lacking attention almost 100% of the time, whether it's because they're half asleep, drunk, texting, or distracted b…

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.

The systems you're referring to are radar based systems. Tesla stopped putting radar in the Model 3/Y in favor of it's vision system.

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the 12 incidents and the Tesla Models involved. Were the incidents involving radar/vision blended, or vision only vehicles or both?

If the incidents only involved older vehicles that were radar equipped, that would be good PR for the vision only system. If the incidents were in vision only systems, it would be bad. I suspect it'll probably be a little of both.

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

#147

Post by kook_throwaway »

mikepurvis wrote: post #101
guhidalg wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s also 12 than any normal attentive human has gotten into Are you comparing a fleet of cars driving millions of miles to the performance of one ostensibly good driver? Ok, I guess we’ll need perfect systems, see you after the heat death of the universe.

I get this argument in abstract, but I don't think it's fair when we're talking about obviously unsafe behaviour that literally no human driver should ever do, except in cases of like, extreme medical distress. It's about the unknown unknowns. If you have Teslas slamming into stopped emergency vehicles with their lights on, and you don't know why, what else don't we know about their ability to perceive and reason abo…

Humans should never do it, but I'd be surprised if it happened less than once a week.

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

#148

Post by tablespoon »

meepmorp wrote: post #2

> The safety agency informed Tesla weeks ago that it was looking into the spate of crashes in which Tesla vehicles operating on Autopilot failed to detect stopped emergency vehicles with flashing lights. The regulator originally said it was looking into 11 such crashes. A 12th occurred on Saturday, when a Model 3 hit a police cruiser that had stopped behind a car that had broken down on an interstate in Orlando, Fla.…

>> The safety agency informed Tesla weeks ago that it was looking into the spate of crashes in which Tesla vehicles operating on Autopilot failed to detect stopped emergency vehicles with flashing lights. The regulator originally said it was looking into 11 such crashes. A 12th occurred on Saturday, when a Model 3 hit a police cruiser that had stopped behind a car that had broken down on an interstate in Orlando, Fla.

> 12 crashes into vehicles with flashing lights on them doesn't sound like great success from Autopilot, gonna be honest.

It's really surprising what people will put up with. IIRC, recently "autopilot" had some regressions in the situations it could handle, and Elon Musk tweeted something to the effect of "Yeah, this version sucks since we're retraining all our NNs."

Like how did something that half-baked ever make it to production in a safety critical system?

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

#149

Post by cptskippy »

simion314 wrote: post #131
nilstycho wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are systems that can detect stationary objects, Tesla does not want to use those more reliable systems What systems are you referring to? Lidar and radar systems can't reliably detect stationary objects as hazards, because most of the world is stationary and consequently gets filtered out.

Filtering out is the problem that develoeprs/engineers should solve right? I can't accept the idea that the car can hit a wall because "our devs are too incompetent or we are to cheap to use better hardware" , a wall or a truck does not look like a bridge or a shadow or a sign, if the AI is too stupid then is not ready, even if is better then a drunk teen that drives a 15 years old car in some very specific situation…

The problem is with the sensors, not the AI, and occurs across the industry and isn't exclusive to Tesla. Volvo's Pilot Assist has the same short comings.

https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/

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

#150

Post by tablespoon »

brk wrote: post #36
meepmorp wrote: post #2

> The safety agency informed Tesla weeks ago that it was looking into the spate of crashes in which Tesla vehicles operating on Autopilot failed to detect stopped emergency vehicles with flashing lights. The regulator originally said it was looking into 11 such crashes. A 12th occurred on Saturday, when a Model 3 hit a police cruiser that had stopped behind a car that had broken down on an interstate in Orlando, Fla.…

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…

> By this point, there must be 1M+ incidents of Tesla vehicles passing roadside emergency vehicles in an adjacent lane.

> 12 crashes is 12 crashes too many, statistically speaking, but it's also a tiny tiny percentage of the total number of cases.

That perspective is little more than spin. Most serious flaws are like that.

Any failure that isn't a "tiny tiny percentage of the total number of cases" is pretty serious. If it was even a small percentage (say 0.01%), Tesla autopilot would be banned from the road, and maybe Elon Musk would go to jail (or at least Tesla would probably get bankrupted) for releasing such a hazardous product.

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