giving new meaning to 'move fast and break things'
Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?
61–70 of 147 posts
Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?
#62Ive a Jeep Grand Cherokee. It has the front sensing collision detector and auto braking. It may have hit the brakes 1 time that I wasnt paying attention and 9,999,999 times when there was nothing in front of me. I disable it and thus far have avoided crashing. The point is that driver assist systems are only assist and you have to pay attention when you drive. Ive said this here before, Autopilot is a terrible misnom…
Dunno, autopilot (at least originally) was just a stupid switch on a plane that would try to hold altitude and speed. It wouldn't try to avoid objects, couldn't take off, couldn't land. Very similar to Tesla's auto pilot, that can't manage your driveway, random surface streets, but can mostly (but not completely) handle highways.
Good perspective.
I think, as you noted, that 'autopilot' is probably fine, but 'full self driving' is actively misleading.
Note that I use FSD for 90+% of all of my driving, and I think I'm safer because of it, but it has to be used with understanding and care. The very name 'full self driving' is something it might be some day, but it's nowhere close to that now.
Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, if the computer can recognize the situation it can always slow down, alert the driver, and eventually stop. That's the nice thing about cars: There's always a safe default mode. I suspect that the computer cannot recognize this problem reliably, though.
Slowing down to under 40mph is not a safe thing to do on a highway and is illegal in many places. And suddenly slowing down is extra unsafe when there's a car right behind you that's also being blinded.
Slowing down on a highway is required by law in many areas, in the presence of emergency vehicles.
Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?
#64Automatic 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…
Just as another point of reference, my (2021) Mazda 3 AEB has only ever activated when another driver stopped short in front of me. I believe it's configurable in settings, though your experience may be worse due to environmental concerns (bugs, rain, dust), different model year, or simply being a bigger vehicle (with a different bumper height or more mass requiring more time to stop).
Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does Tesla even have a radar?
I dont think so. I thought their whole gimmick or goal was to drive entirely by cameras and nothing else. Because humans only have eyes. Though just speculation and no source.
Due to the current chip shortage they've moved to a vision-only system, as they had difficulty getting radar units in the quantity required. Until recently however, all Teslas had radar since ~2014. The high profile crashes are mostly/all radar-enabled vehicles.
The thing about automotive radar, and this isn't just Tesla, is that stationary objects are normally excluded. Otherwise the system brakes for things like overhead signs that have high radar reflectivity. Stopped cars, concrete barriers, etc are all basically invisible to most automotive radar.
Tesla also isn't the only manufacturer taking the vision approach. Subaru, for example, was doing vision-only emergency braking in 2016.
Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if the cameras or ML are thrown off by flashing emergency lights or emergency vehicles' livery (most cars on the road use just 1 paint color)
Yeah. I'm as big a Tesla booster as you'll find but I'm in the "this is probably a bug in recognition" camp. They can presumably fix this via properly parametrized modelling. It's not a rare edge case at all.
I have a hunch that at some point, there'll be an investigation and a discovery process, and we'll learn that the training dataset deliberately _excluded_ emergency vehicles because they didn't represent "normal driving" or something.
That's purely uninformed speculation, but I could see it happening like this: Early on, someone says "The totality of situations encountered on the road is too complex. We're not building a system to do everything, we're building it to take over during the boring parts of a drive. Only teach it the boring stuff." Then a few years later, someone else, forgetting those initial assumptions, says "Hey this thing has done like a billion miles of boring stuff, why wouldn't you trust it for more?"
Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?
#67Automatic 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…
What happens when the auto braking engages? Does it just slam the brakes on and stop dead? Wouldn't that be a big risk of you getting rear ended by someone behind you (especially if it's a false alarm)?
Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?
#68Automatic 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…
What's the source for this claim? Are you accounting for the fact different classes of vehicle have differing accident statistics (e.g. comparing teslas to similarly old and expensive alternatives), and that autopilot's miles are not a random sample of all driven miles?
Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?
#69I read in another HN thread, that some Tesla owners have experienced "ghost braking," and have adopted the technique of holding their foot just above the accelerator, in order to counteract it.
When I read that, I made a mental note to slow down a bit if a Tesla gets behind me, so they will pass me. Usually that's not a problem, as I don't drive particularly fast.
I don't know if this is an issue with other brands of cars. My fancy new Subaru has never ghost-braked.
Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?
#70Automatic 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.
"The one on my 2016 C-class Mercedes was so bad that it almost caused two accidents. If not for years of pingpong..."
Care to elaborate? Both how it nearly caused an accident, and how you avoided one seem interesting!