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Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

latimes.com

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Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

#131

Post by ddalex »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #130
llampx wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans only have eyes? So Teslas can smell the milk and throw it out if its gone bad? Or listen to a faraway sound and know that its getting closer at an alarming or not-alarming rate? Or feel the road getting harsher and understand that the GPS is incorrect?

> So Teslas can smell the milk and throw it out if its gone bad? Cars do not need that skill. > Or listen to a faraway sound and know that its getting closer at an alarming or not-alarming rate? I'm sure the car has multiple microphones, it just needs the brains to process the input. > Or feel the road getting harsher and understand that the GPS is incorrect? Again, I am sure the car has multiple G sensors, accelerom…

> Cars do not need that skill.

As a driver, I can certainly sense my car smelling funny if something goes wrong :)

Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

#133

Post by erulabs »

ReGenGen wrote: post #89
shiftpgdn wrote: post #25

It always bugs me they trot out the Mountain View crash as an example where a Model X struck an unmarked and unprotected jersey barrier end in what visually looks like a traffic lane. Further that multiple human drivers had hit the divider in the same spot and a near fatal accident occurred literally the next day into the same barrier. If I put a brick wall on the freeway and paint it to look like a tunnel ala wil-e-…

If it fools .1% of human drivers and 50% of automated Tesla's I'd say is Tesla's fault.

It’s Mountain View California - fully 50% of the cars on the roads are Teslas

Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

#134

Post by mindslight »

brokenmachine wrote: post #95
mindslight wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I specifically laid out what I do, and what I believe most other people do, as humans having to cope with increased danger. I'm in no way trying to defend Tesla, but rather pointing out a general road hazard that needlessly exists and that perhaps isn't being handled gracefully by automation. This idea that a vehicle can always fall back to stopping comes from the same mistaken place as asserting that a human driver…

Well there's really only two options for a self driving car that has lost situational awareness - (1) keep going at the same speed, or (2) slow down and alert the driver (and possibly stop if the driver doesn't respond). Choeger was suggesting that (2) was the prudent option. You replied and appeared to be suggesting the first option because slowing down was dangerous. But I contend that (1) is the more dangerous opt…

Like handing control back to the human, it depends on the timescale. Over longer periods, yes, obviously the only sane option is to stop. But if confidence in sensors or analysis suddenly drops, especially when the system is still under development and unknowns are expected, the response needs to be graceful rather than sudden.

This is reflected in their comment generally, but talks past the context of my comment. In the scenario I'm envisioning, most of the view is fine right up until say the last ten seconds, where the dynamic range of the camera is suddenly overloaded. That's not enough time to talk about stopping or handing off control, and slowing down isn't going to help with the automation having lost the lane. A human gets through the situation by making a plan ahead of time, including taking note of how a road curves and guessing that the lane will remain clear. Whereas I can imagine automation responding in a horribly wrong way.

Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

#135

Post by adfrhgeaq5hy »

bradknowles wrote: post #112
adfrhgeaq5hy wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans only have eyes... and the most powerful supercomputer in the world between their ears. The goal is to cut costs and keep shipping during the chip shortage. Ignore the excuses.

Humans also have ears. And a sense of touch. And a sense of motion. And that supercomputer between the ears has decades of experience doing sensor fusion amongst all the various inputs down to the level of milliseconds of variation, and decades of experience of rising in cars and knowing what they feel is safe versus what is not, and presumably at least months of experience of control behind the wheel. Tesla doesn’t…

To my knowledge, they don't even have binocular vision. For several angles there is only one camera. Even where there are multiple cameras, they are clustered together and so of limited use for binocular vision. It seems there are multiple cameras to improve range and FoV rather than depth perception.

So it's like a small animal with one eye closed.

Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

#136

Post by oh_sigh »

mey wrote: post #132
delfinom wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many manufacturers are removing radar in their latest model spins fwiw.

Suddenly my 2016 car just got much more valuable to me.

Except you are at the whim and mercy of Tesla to keep providing updated support using lidar. They will probably just not use the lidar any more and merely use the cameras(which you also have) like they are on the 2021 Model 3/Y

Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

#137

Post by RattleyCooper »

blitzar wrote: post #121
UncleEntity wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mountain View crash where the driver reported that specific location to Tesla on multiple occasions and still let the robocar drive full speed into the jersey barrier on autopilot?

It sounds a bit like the 3 foot wide concrete pillar that came out of nowhere and scratched half way down the passenger side of the car recently.

You can blame the driver but if tesla calls their systems "auto-pilot" or "full self-driving" mode then they're creating expectations in people's minds that they aren't going to be kamikaze'd into a concrete wall... When they create these expectations and then people die, something needs to change.

Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

#138

Post by paulryanrogers »

raxxorrax wrote: post #125
beamatronic wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, at least some do, and they recently disabled it in a recent software update

Any info as to why? Simply because it is redundant or is there a technical problem with it?

IIRC there's concern of crosstalk as it becomes more common. So relying on it in a radar-noisy environment would be risky.

Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

#139

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #97
dazbradbury wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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!

There were two instances that were particularly memorable, the first was when passing through a steel bridge with fairly narrow spacing, the car - without any warning - slammed on the brakes just as I was passing the entrance to the bridge. The road surface was wet from recent rain and the car immediately started to spin due to uneven grip. I managed to avoid the posts :) This happened once more in the same spot but…

[deleted]

Re: Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?

#140

Post by lacker »

seoaeu wrote: post #44
lacker wrote: post #16

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…

How would you define "clearly better than human" for a driver assist technology? Like if 'driver + automatic breaking' gets into fewer crashes than 'driver', is that a success? What if the assist is constantly doing phantom breaking, but never hits anything?

If it's a lot fewer crashes, and phantom braking happens rarely, that would be pretty strong evidence. After some brief looking around the internet, I didn't really find any good evidence, or any weak evidence, it seems like we don't really know. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these systems perform far better than others and the general lack of data and transparency makes it hard to figure out whether they are better than human, or not, or it's a mix.
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