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

nytimes.com

161–170 of 192 posts

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

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No Waymo car has crashed into an emergency vehicle yet.

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

#162
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…

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...

My takeaway from that article was that there's not enough trust in the raw inputs and possibly a missing continuous weighting system of the sensory interpretations. (humans do this naturally, weighing their various sensory interpretations in real-time simultaneously)

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

#163

> The regulator originally said it was looking into 11 such crashes. A 12th occurred on Saturday But there are 4500 crashes every year, and that's only including ambulances ( https://www.ems.gov/pdf/GroundAmbulanceCrashesPresentation.p... pg 22). So why is Tesla being investigated for being involved in 0.25% of these crashes when they made up 3% of car sales in 2020? Also, radar ignores stationary objects on any car.…

> So why is Tesla being investigated for being involved in 0.25% of these crashes when they made up 3% of car sales in 2020? How does the proportion of sales in one year have anything to do with the proportion of crashes that involve cars on the road which were purchased at any time? Furthermore, this is Teslas on autopilot mode--not Teslas in manual driving mode

>> So why is Tesla being investigated for being involved in 0.25% of these crashes when they made up 3% of car sales in 2020?

> How does the proportion of sales in one year have anything to do with the proportion of crashes that involve cars on the road which were purchased at any time? Furthermore, this is Teslas on autopilot mode--not Teslas in manual driving mode

Also, a faulty design is a faulty design, regardless of the proportion of total accidents it causes. All faulty designs should be investigated. The theoretical existence of a "faultier" design isn't a get out of jail for all other designs.

Unfortunately, Tesla has a lot of apologists whose main concern seems to defend it for all criticism, even if the arguments required to do that are specious and unreasonable.

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

#164
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 12 crashes into vehicles with flashing lights on them doesn't sound like great success from Autopilot, gonna be honest. I'm sorry, but how can you form an opinion so quickly? 12 crashes out of what? Any number? 12 crashes out of 10000000 scenarios sound like a pretty good record, while 12 crashes out of 15 scenarios indeed doesn't sound like a great success. But what information do you have that the rest of us does…

"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…

> 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.

Are you saying it doesn't matter how often it happens? I'd be a lot more worried about things if something happens always compared to it happening in some cases. Sure, stationary objects should be driven into, I agree. But if this only happens 1 time over the course of 10 years, I'd be a lot more lenient than if it happens once per week, no matter if the reason is "good or bad" (not sure what that means?)

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

#165
post #40
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense but that is whataboutism. I think every crash, where an investigation could prevent another crash in the future, should be investigated. Shouldn't Tesla "celebrate their mistakes" (yes, morbid, sorry) and see this as an opportunity to improve their product?

Tesla is already putting a lot of resources into improving Autopilot and FSD. I'm not sure how regulators are going to help that process, and I think there are a couple possible pitfalls: (1) Will they take relative risk into account? If the car sometimes crashes but less often than humans, will that be sufficient, or considered a flaw because it's not perfect and regulators hate looking bad? (2) Will they take progr…

I never crashed into a stationary vehicle or had a crash. I want a FSD vehicle to be at least as safe as me, not some bad or drunken driver, that's what FSD should be measured against.

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

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

From my reading of your link you are wrong.

How a code that decides what to ignore or not is a sensor issue? Sensors tell you that there is something in front, sure maybe is a sudden thing and there is no velocity/acceleration vector for a few moments but the object is detected ...the software DECIDES what to ignore.

The example where a car changes slane and the code ignores any static object in front of that car seems a clear case of a crash waiting to happen, the car in front might change the lane to avoid something. (and the fact that some other tech that is honestly labeled lane assist has this issue does not excuse a self claimed autopilot to have same flaws."

Let me summarize and let me know where I am wrong:

"Because the software is bad and it triggers too many false positives the coders added a "clever" hack , we ignore most static objects."

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

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The failure modes of a new driving system are going to be distributed differently than the old system. This is exactly the same flawed argument as "we should ban all human drivers because in the situation where they get drunk they have lots of accidents and self-driving cars don't have that problem". That said, I suspect there is some systematic issue with Tesla's system and flashing lights, and I bet they are workin…

which unfortunately also makes them less predictable for other drivers and thus harder to account for/react to in time

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

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The sensors could detect a solid object, the issue seems to be that the sensors will detect many things and the AI or the hardware is incapable to handle the amount of sensors data.

Though the Google car seems to have strong enough hardware to keep track of many vehicles and objects at a big enough distance to not be surprised if something appears or disappears for a frame.

Not sure what people want for a sensor, to detect and label the objects for you? or calculate velocities and predict the future? That seems to be the software developers job but you might need competent people and not throwing big data into a black box and retrain until it mostly works.

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

#169

This not a feature that Autopilot or any other of the lane keeping systems have at the moment. If we are going to say that this is an issue then pretty much all lane keeping systems would have to be outlawed. If it is really impossible for people to pay attention without their hands on the wheel at all the time then all lane keeping must be abolished or a standard needs to be established what 'paying attention' means…

>- Only allow any kind of lane keeping if a comprehensive testing that they can detect any obstetrical of any kind and have emergency breaking. This of course would simply mean less such system would be deployed as most companies don't have practical scalable solution for this as of yet.

probably this. it's a nice feature but it lulls you into a false sense of security and just doesn't seem to mesh well with human nature. It works well enough most of the time that people start trusting it too much over time

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

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No Waymo car has crashed into an emergency vehicle yet.

Waymo has driven 20 million miles. Autopilot has driven (about) 4 billion miles.
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