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

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

#121

Post by judge2020 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #92
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…

Tesla continues to misleadingly use this comparison, and somehow people continue to fall for it. Autopilot will refuse to engage in a wide variety of situations . It will only engage in the easiest, safest scenarios. You cannot compare those miles against all miles driven by human drivers, which include narrow winding mountain passes, two inches of snowy slush, etc. Even the 1M non-autopilot comparison; you're compar…

> Autopilot will refuse to engage in a wide variety of situations. It will only engage in the easiest, safest scenarios.

Do you have any proof of this? I can enable it on a dirt road if there are visible enough edges of the road.

But yes, obviously, they're being a bit misleading by aggregating all miles together. In aggregate, it is overall safer on the highway, and I don't think you can argue in good faith that the safety report is wrong about that.

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

#122

Post by jlkuester7 »

trbleclef wrote: post #62
WirelessGigabit wrote: post #47

While I don't know how good Tesla's self-driving is, I do have experience with a limited keep-your-lane system in a BMW. The one that actually steers. It requires a lot of force to override it. And remember, it requires you to keep the hands on the wheel. But you are not expecting to have to fight it, so there are some delays there. Then you're fighting a system that you don't know how much force it takes to override…

This all feels very MCAS to me.

Yes this is it! I was trying to describe my misgivings with this functionality and this is exactly it. You have a powerful system with a ton of edge cases where the penalty for getting a minor edge case wrong is that someone(s) dies.

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

#123

Post by bluGill »

staunton wrote: post #106
basisword wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It might be legal, but in court what you advertise the car can do generally has high weight than what you put in the warning documentation. Thus Tesla is stupid for making any such claims as now they have admitted in court they think their car is fully self driving which means the car should be liable. Even if Tesla can prove that the car was under manual control the courts are still justified for finding Tesla for anything that happens as they have clearly claimed the car is self driving.

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

#124

Post by itsoktocry »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #57
ra7 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These two were idiots, but this highlights the dangers of L2 driver assistance systems (misleadingly marketed as "Full Self Driving") that requires driver attention at all times to prevent accidents. It gives you a false sense of security and there's no guarantee you'll take over in time to prevent an accident. If you give dumb toys to people, they will use it in dumb ways. This is why Waymo/Google abandoned their dr…

Totally agree. As a driver with a car with advanced "driver assistance features", I honestly don't understand how people get value out of most of these. That is, I'd rather just use a system where I know I have to be in control at all times, vs one where "You only have to be in control 1% of the time, oh and if you miss that 1%, you're dead." For example, I recently tried using the adaptive cruise control/lane center…

>I honestly don't understand how people get value out of most of these. That is, I'd rather just use a system where I know I have to be in control at all times, vs one where "You only have to be in control 1% of the time, oh and if you miss that 1%, you're dead."

A lot of accidents happen from a split second of lack of attention. Lane keep prevents you from inadvertently drifting over the centre line into traffic. Radar cruise control prevents you from rear ending the vehicle in front of you. Both of these simple features are awesome.

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

#125

Post by ceejayoz »

Kerbonut wrote: post #113
ceejayoz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla continues to misleadingly use this comparison, and somehow people continue to fall for it. Autopilot will refuse to engage in a wide variety of situations . It will only engage in the easiest, safest scenarios. You cannot compare those miles against all miles driven by human drivers, which include narrow winding mountain passes, two inches of snowy slush, etc. Even the 1M non-autopilot comparison; you're compar…

Normalizing the data to make a direct comparison is a hard problem. Do you know of any research done to try to do that?

It's a lot easier to tease out the impact of individual safety features.

For example, there's quite a bit of evidence that lane departure warnings/assistance helps: https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/lane-departure-wa...

Less indication backup cameras do anything: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-back-up-cameras-20...

Tesla's non-autopilot numbers likely reflect the fact that they're exclusively newer vehicles with safety features that aren't yet widely standard. You'd probably see similarly nice numbers for other $50k+ luxury vehicles with similar bells-and-whistles.

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

#126

Post by sokoloff »

EA-3167 wrote: post #102
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.”

I'm no Tesla fan boy, but it seems entirely possible that even the limited capability of FSD was better/safer than a driver whose BAC was 0.26%, even if this one ended up in a fatal crash, as that happens to drunk human drivers at the rate of more than 10K deaths per year in the US.

If this is the first FSD death in the world, Tesla is probably thankful that it was someone who was hammered.

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

#127

Post by dns_snek »

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…

And this is a misinformed comment from someone who blindly parrots Tesla's numbers even though we know, for a fact, that Tesla doesn't follow industry reporting practices by redacting, obscuring, hiding information.

Their numbers don't even normalize or otherwise account for different roads, road conditions, environmental conditions, cars involved and their safety systems, or drivers behind the wheel.

If they were interested in making good faith comparisons, the "US average" would read "US average of comparable vehicles under equivalent weather & road conditions" and "Tesla vehicles not using autopilot" would read "Tesla vehicles not using autopilot under equivalent weather & road conditions".

You're essentially telling us that drivers driving Teslas with active autopilot (i.e. limited to great weather conditions on high quality roads) have fewer accidents than those without active autopilot (e.g. driving in poor weather conditions, or on bad roads). That's not much of an insight.

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

#128

Post by oscb »

eschneider wrote: post #84
fisherjeff wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YES. Thank you. I rode in a Model Y last year and just could not believe the mistakes it was making. Disappearing and reappearing cars; the semi in front of us was apparently straddling the lane line for a few miles; somehow an early-2000s Dodge Ram was classified as a small sedan – the list goes on, and this was only a ~10-minute ride. I would be absolutely mortified if a product of mine ended up in front of a custo…

I spent a decade working on commercial computer vision applications that, among other things, had to recognize and track cars. Those are exactly the sort of transient errors you'd expect to see in shipping products and they usually have heuristics to "smooth" over those sorts of problems. That said, would I ever trust my life to a system like that? No.

I'm actually surprised they show it as raw as it looks. Doesn't inspire too much confidence, even though I bet the system must be reclassifying and changing way faster than it renders things on screen.

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

#129

Post by ceejayoz »

judge2020 wrote: post #121
ceejayoz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla continues to misleadingly use this comparison, and somehow people continue to fall for it. Autopilot will refuse to engage in a wide variety of situations . It will only engage in the easiest, safest scenarios. You cannot compare those miles against all miles driven by human drivers, which include narrow winding mountain passes, two inches of snowy slush, etc. Even the 1M non-autopilot comparison; you're compar…

> Autopilot will refuse to engage in a wide variety of situations. It will only engage in the easiest, safest scenarios. Do you have any proof of this? I can enable it on a dirt road if there are visible enough edges of the road. But yes, obviously, they're being a bit misleading by aggregating all miles together. In aggregate, it is overall safer on the highway, and I don't think you can argue in good faith that the…

Will you accept Tesla's word for it?

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-101D1BF...

> In addition, these features may not work as intended when: The road has sharp curves or significant changes in elevation.; Road signs and signals are unclear, ambiguous, or poorly maintained.; Visibility is poor (due to heavy rain, snow, hail, etc. or poorly lit roadways at night); You are driving in a tunnel or next to a highway divider that interferes with the view of the camera(s); Bright light (such as from oncoming headlights or direct sunlight) interferes with the view of the camera(s).

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-E5FF5E8...

> Full Self-Driving (Beta) and its associated functions may not operate as intended and there are numerous situations in which driver intervention may be needed. Examples include (but are not limited to): Interactions with pedestrians, bicyclists, and other road users.; Unprotected turns with high-speed cross traffic.; Multi-lane turns.; Simultaneous lane changes.; Narrow roads with oncoming cars or double-parked vehicles.; Rare objects such as trailers, ramps, cargo, open doors, etc. protruding from vehicles.; Merges onto high-traffic, high-speed roads.; Debris in the road.; Construction zones.; High curvature roads, particularly at fast driving speeds.

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

#130

Post by judge2020 »

bluGill wrote: post #123
staunton wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably is illegal...

It might be legal, but in court what you advertise the car can do generally has high weight than what you put in the warning documentation. Thus Tesla is stupid for making any such claims as now they have admitted in court they think their car is fully self driving which means the car should be liable. Even if Tesla can prove that the car was under manual control the courts are still justified for finding Tesla for a…

What absurd logical leaps. If this is so clearly the case, then I don't know why every single law firm in the country isn't scrambling to sue Tesla via a class-action right this minute.
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