yet another tesla hit piece from russ mitchell and the la times. is it just me or does the la times drag tesla at every opportunity? could it be because the owner of the la times, patrick soon shiong, has a company called nantenergy that seeks to compete with tesla? at a minimum, there’s a conflict of interest. and, kind of a tangent, but where are the articles about the thousands of lives lost due to the incompatibi…
I'm pretty neutral on Tesla/Musk, but I looked at this guy's (Russ Mitchell) writing history and it appears to be an unhealthy fixation on Tesla. His Twitter, and almost every article he writes, is about bashing Tesla. It's like he has real personal beef with Musk, a person he's probably never met.
Trying not to be a Tesl fanboy, but they have a nice graph showing the number of auto pilot complaints but fail to mention if they normalized for the number of cars on the road (with autopilot) of that brand. Maybe there are a ton of Tesla complaints because they have way more cars on the road? What's the percentage? I guess we'll never know. Not great reporting.
FTA: “The rate of complaints about Tesla, relative to the number of its cars sold in the U.S. in 2020, was more than three times that of the other automakers.” Still a bad comparison, but I would think that the number relative to the number of cars in use of each brand wouldn’t be better for Tesla. The real question would be how this would be relative to the number of miles driven (which, I guess, is about as fair as…
After several officers where nearly injured/injured/killed because drivers ran into them as they were stopped on the side of the road, some states instituted laws that say you either slow down to 45 or you move over a lane. Is that built into AutoPilot and whatever it's called on other brands? Humans have to do it, so cars should have to as well.
Every lane change is a possible collision. I wonder if that was taken into account.
Considering how far away flashing lights can be sensed (in both humans and cars), that shouldn't be a problem.
After several officers where nearly injured/injured/killed because drivers ran into them as they were stopped on the side of the road, some states instituted laws that say you either slow down to 45 or you move over a lane. Is that built into AutoPilot and whatever it's called on other brands? Humans have to do it, so cars should have to as well.
Every lane change is a possible collision. I wonder if that was taken into account.
Can autopilot even change lanes? It seems like that would be impossible to code for freeways in cities in California. You have to muscle your way into the lane and force people to back down or get hit or else they aren't ever letting you in.
Automatic braking doesn't get much attention, but it seems like something that could be incredibly valuable if it got to the "clearly better than human" level. This is purely anecdotal, but I find the automatic braking system on my Mazda CX-9 to be fairly annoying. Once every couple months or so, it has a false alarm and brakes while blaring out alerts, in an urban environment where I don't observe anything out of th…
The one on my 2016 C-class Mercedes was so bad that it almost caused two accidents. If not for years of pingpong... I got rid of it after having it checked out and declared healthy, if that system wasn't broken it might as well be. Worse than useless. Don't get a MB with automatic emergency braking unless you want to covertly commit suicide.
yet another tesla hit piece from russ mitchell and the la times. is it just me or does the la times drag tesla at every opportunity? could it be because the owner of the la times, patrick soon shiong, has a company called nantenergy that seeks to compete with tesla? at a minimum, there’s a conflict of interest. and, kind of a tangent, but where are the articles about the thousands of lives lost due to the incompatibi…
I'm pretty neutral on Tesla/Musk, but I looked at this guy's (Russ Mitchell) writing history and it appears to be an unhealthy fixation on Tesla. His Twitter, and almost every article he writes, is about bashing Tesla. It's like he has real personal beef with Musk, a person he's probably never met.
He's a journalist, they typically get assigned to cover certain topics. Not surprising that he focuses on the EV space, that's probably in his job description for LA times.
After several officers where nearly injured/injured/killed because drivers ran into them as they were stopped on the side of the road, some states instituted laws that say you either slow down to 45 or you move over a lane. Is that built into AutoPilot and whatever it's called on other brands? Humans have to do it, so cars should have to as well.
Every lane change is a possible collision. I wonder if that was taken into account.
Except it's not. Every lane change in semi-dense and dense traffic is a possible collision; I'd say if you have a car moving in the same direction as you are, and it's closer than ~50 feet, then it's a non-negligible possibility, other than that you just have nobody to collide with during lane change . We're talking highway speeds, of course, not racetrack
My hypothesis on this is that all automaker's automatic emergency braking systems likely function at approximately the same level, but Tesla drivers are disproportionately likely to rely on it due to the use of Autopilot being so incredibly common. Statistically, drivers of other brands that include similar lanekeeping abilities are far less likely to use them compared to Tesla owners' use of Autopilot. Should it be…
Sorry, your hypothesis makes no sense. There are WAY more cars sold by other brands, so more Tesla incidents is even more galling. Using autopilot should only HELP the auto braking not make it worse.
Other systems use radar and camera. They are thoroughly tested by the OEMs and suppliers to strict tolerances.
Meanwhile Tesla is shipping beta software and having people test it. Including removing radar because of “phantom” braking.
Automatic braking doesn't get much attention, but it seems like something that could be incredibly valuable if it got to the "clearly better than human" level. This is purely anecdotal, but I find the automatic braking system on my Mazda CX-9 to be fairly annoying. Once every couple months or so, it has a false alarm and brakes while blaring out alerts, in an urban environment where I don't observe anything out of th…
> Automatic braking doesn't get much attention, but it seems like something that could be incredibly valuable if it got to the "clearly better than human" level. It's important to point out here that a handful of back of the envelope analyses are out there that show that Tesla's autopilot is already "clearly better than human" level at avoiding emergency vehicles. These are very common accidents. Emergency vehicles i…
I think the problem here is calling something "better than human" because it manages to avoid some accidents. If a car avoids one accident for every 100,000 times it intervenes, that isn't really a good thing. It just means that drivers start to ignore flashing lights and warnings because they are always meaningless. Maybe it even causes some accidents by distracting the driver, and they don't get categorized as "caused by the automatic braking system" because nothing really tracks that.
Every time I start my car, about 15 seconds into the drive a popup appears on the screen, saying something like "Warning: automated driving assistance system can cause distraction. Select OK to dismiss". Thanks, you have reduced your own liability in exchange for further distracting the driver.
It's kind of interesting that this appears to happen with police cars and emergency vehicles mostly. Is there a particular way of parking such vehicles that makes it hard(er) for a Tesla to detect it? It might also indeed be about phantom braking. My relatively old (probably designed around 10 to 20 years ago) system gets confused sometimes when I pass a truck or a bus and once even when I passed a bicycle. It happen…
I think the flashing lights and appearance might degrade autopilot. Other cars also have issues because they use radar (except for some new models with camera-based systems like the 2022 Honda Civic) and ignore stationary targets when they see a moving vehicle as a more likely "target". Some systems use a combination of radar and camera (with camera providing low-speed, parked car, bike, and pedestrian detection). Th…
The human visual system is amazing at normalizing across many orders of magnitudes (cf HDR imaging), but yet with the evolution of LED lights and a lack of accountability, the lights on police cars have gotten way too bright for even human drivers at night. I wouldn't be surprised if the ultimate cause is a complete swamping of the cameras for everything that isn't immediately in front of the car, and even the lane lines disappearing when close enough to the blinding lights. What is a computer supposed to do when confronted with complete loss of visual input? A human will squint, slow down by 10-20mph, extrapolate the lane lines, and play the odds. But there is no surefire way to proceed safely, and thus no straightforward action to program a computer with.