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Tesla worker killed in fiery crash may be first 'Full Self-Driving' fatality

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Tesla worker killed in fiery crash may be first 'Full Self-Driving' fatality

#101

Post by jMyles »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #22
eganist wrote: post #13

So there's an interesting legal question here. If someone's drunk (i.e diminished reasoning) and steps into the car expecting that a feature named "full self driving" will safely drive them home, how is responsibility divided between the person who got drunk and the entity who created and named the "full self driving" feature? I don't think even a reasonable person could consistently conclude that "full self driving"…

If it's truly self driving then the passenger shouldn't be responsible at all. Would riders be responsible for taxi drivers?

Interesting question.

If you get into a cab, and the driver is clearly drunk or exhibits violent behavior on the road, surely you have some responsibility to terminate your ride.

So if you get into a Tesla with it's wink-wink-nudge-nudge-named FSD, which warns you to be ready to take over, and you then note that the person being asked to take over is intoxicated... it seems like the responsibility is clearly on the operator.

But your standard - "it's truly self driving" - is a higher one. And I really don't know how to think about responsibility in that case, and it feels like a big problem. On one hand, it seems that, in the coming decades, we'll likely have actual full self-driving that operates in some situations in manners that are more safe than human drivers (especially people who are intoxicated, who also deserve a safe way home even in car-first hellscapes of urban planning).

On the other hand, we've seen how most of the USA has been terraformed to accommodate the product being hocked by the auto industry, and that this product has long had an undesirable role in population-level mortality rates (even without FSD!).

So yeah, I don't know.

It seems like micro-mobility solutions, and getting highway vehicles out of cities, give us a better outlook altogether anyway. Particularly if there is robust public medium- and long-haul public transit which can convey micro-mobility solutions to faraway lands.

Re: Tesla worker killed in fiery crash may be first 'Full Self-Driving' fatality

#102

Post by EA-3167 »

ra7 wrote: post #48

As I said in another comment, these two were idiots driving drunk. Let's get that out of the way. The bigger issue here is how this deniability is all too convenient for Tesla. The process goes like this: 1. Ship a clearly half baked system called "Full Self Driving". 2. Require driver's hands on the wheel at all times. 3. Be extremely non-transparent about your system's safety. Tesla's crash reports in the public NH…

I think the quote from the article really sums it up in plain language, and the argument Musk presents should be familiar to anyone here, who's heard the "Robots > Humans in a car" argument.

> “Regardless of how drunk Hans was, Musk has claimed that this car can drive itself and is essentially better than a human,” Bass said. “We were sold a false sense of security.”

Re: Tesla worker killed in fiery crash may be first 'Full Self-Driving' fatality

#103

Post by judge2020 »

seles wrote: post #26

One thing I hate about Musk saying things like "They have fewer accidents than people" is that it is only able to be engaged in the easiest of scenarios. So per mile, self driving on the easiest roads barely has less accidents than a human in adverse conditions? That doesn't seem to actually be better than people yet.

https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/... (from [0]).

This is all miles traveled, but clever data analysis uses aggregate data as they've done here. It's not "lying" in that the vast majority of miles are traveled on the highway instead of on city streets or even suburban access roads.

Also note:

> To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed. (Our crash statistics are not based on sample data sets or estimates.)

Of course, Tesla's official guidance in-car via warning messages is that Autopilot is not safe for city streets, only highways, so technically it shouldn't be used on pedestrian-adorned streets anyways.

This also doesn't take into account FSD Beta.

0: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

Re: Tesla worker killed in fiery crash may be first 'Full Self-Driving' fatality

#104

Post by kube-system »

andix wrote: post #27
eganist wrote: post #13

So there's an interesting legal question here. If someone's drunk (i.e diminished reasoning) and steps into the car expecting that a feature named "full self driving" will safely drive them home, how is responsibility divided between the person who got drunk and the entity who created and named the "full self driving" feature? I don't think even a reasonable person could consistently conclude that "full self driving"…

It depends what the "full self driving" feature is legally. How it is described, what the warning messages on the screen tell the driver, what the manual says. If the person was a Tesla employee I think it's safe to assume that they knew it is only an assistant system and the driver still needs to monitor it at all time and able to take over at any time. Hints into this direction pop up at the screen all the time. Th…

Anchoring and peer pressure are strong psychological biases. Public opinion and the opinions of a not-so-smart driver are very relevant when it comes to design for safety.

Re: Tesla worker killed in fiery crash may be first 'Full Self-Driving' fatality

#105

Post by metabagel »

LeFantome wrote: post #43
ra7 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could be perfectly sober and still not be able to intervene in time to prevent a crash. Systems like this encourage inattention, but still expect drivers to turn on attention in a fraction of a second. That's the entire point. So no, it's not moot.

It depends on the discussion you are having. I agree that it is not “moot” in either case. Your point is that these systems need to be save even in the face of incapable drivers and that, despite the misleading marketing, they are not that ( yet ). The other point though is that people already have access to cars and, according to the evidence, cars with these features are LESS dangerous. Encouraging over-reliance is…

> The other point though is that people already have access to cars and, according to the evidence, cars with these features are LESS dangerous.

I don’t think we can say anything of the sort for Tesla FSD (beta).

Re: Tesla worker killed in fiery crash may be first 'Full Self-Driving' fatality

#106

Post by staunton »

basisword wrote: post #89
ra7 wrote: post #48

As I said in another comment, these two were idiots driving drunk. Let's get that out of the way. The bigger issue here is how this deniability is all too convenient for Tesla. The process goes like this: 1. Ship a clearly half baked system called "Full Self Driving". 2. Require driver's hands on the wheel at all times. 3. Be extremely non-transparent about your system's safety. Tesla's crash reports in the public NH…

It should be illegal for them to call it full self drive. It's 100% false advertising not to mention the 'danger' that people will assume it is what it says it is.

It probably is illegal...

Re: Tesla worker killed in fiery crash may be first 'Full Self-Driving' fatality

#107

Post by sakjur »

faeriechangling wrote: post #39
dncornholio wrote: post #9

I have the opinion that if a self driving car is not able to prevent driving into a tree or any other static object, it should not be on the road. It doesn't matter to me if the driver was drunk. Maybe he was drunk because he depended on autopilot to get home. Maybe he would have not had an accident if he drove home himself. We don't know. All I know is drunk driving is dumb and autopilot sucks ass.

Human drivers drive into trees and static objects, and I object to the idea that we need self-driving cars to have superhuman driving abilities for them to be worth using.

There are a lot of people who shouldn’t be allowed to drive cars, too.

Re: Tesla worker killed in fiery crash may be first 'Full Self-Driving' fatality

#108

Post by cnity »

cptcobalt wrote: post #81

This is a sensationalized hit piece against Tesla Autopilot. It is definitely unfortunate the drunk employee operating the car was involved in a crash, that at least from the wp reporting sounds avoidable—Autopilot active or not. Any death is unfortunate, and an opportunity to improve vehicle safety. Tesla's Q4 2023 stats should speak for themselves: > In the 4th quarter, we recorded one crash for every 5.39 million…

There's a causation fallacy at work here. To infer that autopilot is safer according to these stats you would have to control for far too may confounding factors. For example, the majority of crashes occur in rural and urban settings. It is likely that autopilot is in use more often in situations in which crashes are less likely (such as simple, long distance highway driving).

Re: Tesla worker killed in fiery crash may be first 'Full Self-Driving' fatality

#109

Post by paulryanrogers »

faeriechangling wrote: post #33
jvanderbot wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a robotics person outside this space, it's not amazing that the shift to L4 as a goal has not been clearly grok'd by the public. After years of rhetoric, most people still believe that cars will be fully autonomous because they just don't understand the limitations. It's also quite amazing to me we, the so called smart ones, ever believed level 5 was happening but those were the good old days, huh.

It's hard to impossible for me to know how difficult level 5 driving even is since we don't have any machine that can do it. Trying to achieve it has been a good example of turtles all the way down. At the same time I feel like people are ignoring how well self-driving works RIGHT NOW, the rate of accidents is still less than with human drivers. So I'm still pretty optimistic.

How can you know if Tesla won't publicly release stats of interventions or accident per 100k miles?

Re: Tesla worker killed in fiery crash may be first 'Full Self-Driving' fatality

#110

Post by kube-system »

basisword wrote: post #89
ra7 wrote: post #48

As I said in another comment, these two were idiots driving drunk. Let's get that out of the way. The bigger issue here is how this deniability is all too convenient for Tesla. The process goes like this: 1. Ship a clearly half baked system called "Full Self Driving". 2. Require driver's hands on the wheel at all times. 3. Be extremely non-transparent about your system's safety. Tesla's crash reports in the public NH…

It should be illegal for them to call it full self drive. It's 100% false advertising not to mention the 'danger' that people will assume it is what it says it is.

It should be illegal for them to call it even 1% self driving. Because it is no more than 0% self driving. There is no mode of operation in any Tesla where the human is ever, at any moment, not responsible for safely navigating the vehicle.
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