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Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

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Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#301

Post by mindslight »

toddmorey wrote: post #142
xbmcuser wrote: post #22

The point I soured on Musk was when he ditched radar/lidar and tried to go with camera's alone. This made me realize he is not the genius he is made out to be but instead he is a fraud/charlatan and over the years his statements on different topics have only hardened that belief. Why the fuck would you want ai cars to be the same as humans you should want them to be many times better and radarr/lidar sonarr type tech…

This was purely an effort to improve margins on the cars that they tried to sell with other types of rationale. From the way I've seen him operate his companies, treat his employees, and now work with the government, he has a high tolerance for risk paired with a very low tolerance for perceived inefficiencies plus too little patience to fully understand the problem. He really embodies the ethos of "move fast and bre…

The sour irony is that "move fast and break things" was formulated in the low-stakes world of web entertainment software, which was able to become so prominent precisely because of the stability of having our more pressing needs being predictably taken care of (for the most part).

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#302

Post by Homer10 »

The average human eye has 10,000,000 X the dynamic range of even the finest broadcast video camera. So, when the Sun is low on the horizon, all Teslas are effectively blind. Lidar is good, until you get more than one of them in an area. Then the lidars totally interfere with each other resulting in total chaos. Self driving anything is just not ready yet, and won't be for a long time.

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#303

Post by sudosysgen »

Izkata wrote: post #272
Havoc wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Multiple independent sensor streams is like having multiple pilots fly a plane. Don't think that's the right analogy. Realistically you'd aim to combine them meaningfully. A bit like two eyes gives you depth perception. You assume 1+1 is less than two, when really you'd aim for >2

I remember this being his reasoning for it, that the lidar should be unnecessary if they could get multi-camera depth perception to work like it does in humans.

But it won't with current camera technology. The mix of high acuity at the center, moveable camera, wide peripheral vision, object tracking and non-frame-based sensing that allows human eyes to sense the depth of moving objects in low light is not commercially available with camera systems under ~10000$. It's cheaper to install LIDAR than to install cameras which are uniformly as good as the human eye. To get the acuity of a human eye at the center you'd need ~400MPx, or have a gimbaled camera to point towards an object of interest, and tracking small fast objects with such a camera (and at night!) is very very expensive in hardware.

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#304

Post by vitus »

agubelu wrote: post #287
vitus wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's an oversimplification, and helps mainly in the case where one sensor is totally offline. If you have two sensors, one says everything's fine but the other says you're about to crash, which one do you trust? What if the one that says you're about to crash is feeding you bad data? And what if the resulting course correction leads to a different failure? I'd hope that we've learned these lessons from the…

The difference with the 737 Max crashes is that there was only one sensor feeding data to the system, not two. If there's a discrepancy between the two sensors, disconnect the automation and let the human take control. And unlike planes, you can safely stop a car in almost all scenarios.

> The difference with the 737 Max crashes is that there was only one sensor feeding data to the system, not two.

That's fair. I was likely remembering that there were two sensors, since there's one for the pilot and one for the copilot, but not remembering that only one of them was in use.

The other lessons worth noting are that 1) you need to give the human some indicator that something's wrong, and 2) you need to give the human some way of overriding the system.

> And unlike planes, you can safely stop a car in almost all scenarios.

Agreed, mostly. We do have to be careful about how the vehicle disengages and comes to a safe stop, or else we risk repeating the incident where Cruise hit a pedestrian, then pulled to the side of the road while dragging the pedestrian under the vehicle.

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#305

Post by marcusb »

vachina wrote: post #176
marcusb wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we have a lot of proof that human visual detection works well enough to “only” kill around 40k people/year in the US from traffic accidents. I have had a Tesla for several years now. The visual object detection display very frequently misidentifies objects. Just the other day, it detected my garage (which the car was parked next to) as a semi truck. I have never, with my wildly imperfect human vision, mistake…

You may have briefly misidentified a traffic light for a pedestrian light, but you quickly recovered and stopped for the light. Transient errors happen all the time, but somehow you trust yourself more to keep driving.

Sure. I probably have done something like that.

What I’ve not done is seen a motocyclist in front of me, then decided it wasn’t really there, and then hit said motorcyclist.

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#306

Post by kentonv »

Hmm. The article's source is NHTSA data that goes up through February 2025 -- pretty recent.

The article cites 5 motorcycle fatalities in this data.

Four of the five were in 2022, when Tesla FSD was still closed beta.

The remaining incident was in April 2024.

(The article also cites one additional incident in 2023 where the injury severity was "unknown", but the author speculates it may have been fatal.)

I dunno, to me this specific data suggests a technology that has improved a lot. There are far more drivers on the road using FSD today than there were in 2022, and yet fewer incidents?

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#307

Post by crazygringo »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #284
crazygringo wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but that's not all people. If you assume a constant rate of attention, but then massively increase what people are aware of during that attention, that's a massive increase in safety. Safety is affected by lots of factors. Increasing any of them increases safety -- you don't need to increase all of them to get improvements.

... I don't know. Many people are in accidents that are entirely not their fault, e.g. being rear-ended. You can't do anything about those who drive unsafely, distracted, under the influence, etc. Assuming you have a "good" driver, there are still plenty of times they might be into accidents for reasons that aren't because of awareness. For example, road conditions, behavior of other drivers, and just normal, honest…

I don't understand what you're trying to say.

Your eyes aren't good enough, compared to if you had 360° LIDAR awareness, which is the comparison here.

You're listing all these other causes of accidents, which no one disputes. There's still a whole range of accidents caused by limitations in our spatial awareness because we can only ever be looking in one direction at a time.

You're talking about "normal, honest mistakes". That's what I'm talking about. There would be less of those if we had magic 360° LIDAR in our bodies. A lot less. Especially at night, but during the day too.

This isn't about blaming anybody. It's just the simple scientific fact that human senses are limited, and self-driving cars shouldn't limit themselves to human senses. Human senses aren't good enough for preventing all preventable accidents, no matter how "honest" drivers are.

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#308

Post by jajko »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #156
erikpukinskis wrote: post #5

I’m normally quite skeptical of these kinds of “Tesla More Dangerous Than Other Brands” headlines since they tend to be B.S. But this seems like a pretty legitimate accusation, and certainly a well researched write-up at the very least.

What gets me is that there are no other brands in Tesla's league. Tesla is the only consumer car that has "FSD" level ability. The competitors have to use pre-mapped roads and availability is spotty at best. There is also risk as Chevy already deprecated their first gen "FSD", leaving early adopters with gimped ability and shutout from future expansions.

You mean betatesting on millions of users? Yes traditional manufacturers are very wary of class action suits and generally have some reputation to uphold. Tesla, not so much... move fast, break things, kill few people, who cares current profit is all that matters

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#309

Post by Timon3 »

treis wrote: post #239
ruined wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

let's experiment. i'll reduce your vision quality, then you try driving

That's called night and people drive in it just fine.

You are aware that more accidents happen per mile at night? If people drove at night just fine, this wouldn't be the case.

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#310

Post by daveguy »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #254
daveguy wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[citation needed] Tesla releases all self driving statistics including time since disengagement of self-driving before accident, right?

https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-orde... The numbers include all incidents where self-driving was active within 30 seconds of the crash, because of course they do. The meme that Tesla is allowed to simply bypass reporting on a technicality would be absurd if it weren't so voraciously spread by post-truth luddites. Look, if you want to dunk on Elon, I get it, but he does so many real shitty thin…

First, do not put words in my mouth. I did not claim he was "bypassing" federal reporting. Although he quite literally bypassed much more strict self driving reporting in CA by claiming it was ADAS instead of ADS. So maybe know the facts before calling someone a Luddite.

What I literally said was Tesla doesn't release all of the self-driving statistics, like time to disengagement. They are noticeably more cagey about releasing that kind of info claiming it as "trade secret". Did you see the data sets you pointed to before pointing to them? Full of Tesla crashes, and full of redactions.

I don't need to dunk on Elon. He dunks on himself. Some people just worship him too hard to realize it.

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