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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

#311

Post by smallmancontrov »

bumby wrote: post #289
smallmancontrov wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If Tesla is Level 2, that link doesn’t support the OPs point about “all” incidents, but rather only those involved in a fatality, hospital treatment, airbag deployment, or towed vehicle. Am I reading that link correctly?

The problem with "all" incidents is that reporting bias drowns the whole thing in noise. I clipped a curb the other year and didn't report it to anyone -- am I messing up the statistics? In contrast, hospitalizations and bodies are concrete enough to all but eliminate reporting bias.

Of course, at first this just substitutes one type of problem for another because even shitty drivers have to drive many lifetimes of distance before killing anyone so you wind up with the unfortunately named "shot noise" from small-N. But Tesla FSD drives so many miles that the statistics are no longer small-N. If supervised FSD was worse than human, we should be seeing many more bodies than we do, so supervised FSD is clearly better than human.

Of course, that number needs to be adjusted for critical interventions before we can say anything about unsupervised FSD, and in an ideal universe I wish Tesla was forced to disclose those figures. Unfortunately, we live in a universe where luddites are firmly in control of this conversation and I cannot deny that a forced disclosure would be heavily abused in a way that costs lives. Still, regulators get to see the numbers before approving unsupervised rollouts, and as a compromise this makes neither myself nor the luddites happy but I suppose it will do.

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

#312

Post by pfannkuchen »

crazygringo wrote: post #101
pfannkuchen wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do want them to be better than humans, but vision quality is not really a major source of human accidents. Accidents are typically caused by driving technique, inattention, or a failure to accurately model the behavior of other drivers. Put another way - would giving humans superhuman vision significantly reduce the accident rate? The issue here is that the vision based system failed to even match human capabilit…

> Put another way - would giving humans superhuman vision significantly reduce the accident rate? Yes? Incredibly? If people had 360° instant 3D awareness of all objects, that would avoid so many accidents. No more blind spots, no more missing objects because you were looking in one spot instead of another. No more missing dark objects at night. It would be a gigantic improvement in the rate of accidents.

You seem to be missing my point.

Looking in one spot instead of another is included in what I’m calling “attention”. Of course paying attention to everything all the time would be and is a huge improvement. That is orthogonal to the type of vision tech being used. All approaches used in self driving systems today look everywhere all the time.

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

#313

Post by Retric »

bee_rider wrote: post #247
Retric wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars unlike aircraft don’t need to move forward to maintain safety. If the lidar normally has very good uptime but happens to break, you need to safely come to a complete stop and that’s basically it. Trusting vision systems for 30 seconds or even 30 minutes over the lifetime of a car is very different than trusting them for 30,000 hours. So for edge cases sure, add a “this is an emergency drive to a hospital without…

There are cases where cars do need to move. * train tracks as mentioned by another comment * getting out of the way of emergency vehicles or following instructions from emergency workers I don’t think this detracts from the overall point—if the uptime is very good then the times when LiDAR doesn’t work and the car needs to move might practically never happen. Or the car might be able to move forward to a safe positio…

The same basic questions arise for things like a tire blowout.

At minimum cars need to handle being on a curve when LiDAR or vision etc cuts off. Stopping on a freeway or railroad is a real risk even if people can get out, but now you’re doing risk mitigation calculations not just trying to handle normal driving. “What if someone is asleep in a level 5 car?” is a question worth considering, but we’re a long way self driving without any from of human backup.

The hospital thing is for the very real possibility of being outside of cellphone range, and represents the apex of gracefully shutting down the ride vs refusing to travel while in a less safe condition.

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

#314

Post by robwwilliams »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #135
robwwilliams wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep! And no stats at all. Pathetic article.

Do not believe any statistic you didn’t manipulate yourself.

As others have pointed out in this thread you need to correct for miles driven by Teslas in autopilot versus other vehicles driven in autopilot mode. Without this adjustment, the data are meaningless. And with counts of 5 versus 0 you are deep into Poisson noise level. So yes, I stand by “pathetic”.

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

#315

Post by plun9 »

liendolucas wrote: post #99
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…

> instead he is a fraud/charlatan and... Just see him talking about things at NeuraLink. Musk wouldn't exist if it weren't for the people working for him. It's a clown that made it to the top in a very dubious way.

What's wrong with him talking about things at Neuralink?

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

#316

Post by hwillis »

potato3732842 wrote: post #285
throwaway31131 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They generally can't detect stationary objects, have problems with reflections, most of them are VERY low resolution, and so on. Radar can absolutely detect a stationary object. The problem is not, "moving or not moving", it's "is the energy reflected back to the detector," as alluded to by your second qualification. So something that scatters or absorbs the transmitted energy is hard to measure with radar because…

Imagine if you could only see in a very narrow portion of the visible light spectrum, like only green or something. That's kind of how radar "sees" (I'm grossly over-simplifying here but point is it doesn't see the way we do). It's hard to tell something sticking off the back of a truck or a motorcycle behind a vehicle without false positive triggering off of other stuff and panic braking at dumb times, something ear…

> Imagine if you could only see in a very narrow portion of the visible light spectrum, like only green or something.

No, that's how lidar works. Lidars have a single frequency and a very narrow bandwidth. Automotive radars have a bandwidth of 1-5 GHz. They operate around 80 GHz, which is very well reflected by water (including people) and moderately reflected by things like plastic. 80 GHz is industrially used to measure levels of plastic feedstock.

Compare TSA scanner images, which are ~300 GHz: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/a-Front-and-back-millime...

You are correct that most automotive radars like Bosch units [1] are very low detail though. Most of them don't output images or anything- they run proprietary algorithms that identify the largest detection frequencies (usually a limited number of them) and calculate the direction and distance to them. Unlike cameras and lidars they do not return raw data, so naturally when building driver assistance companies instead relied on cameras and lidar. Progress was instead driven by the manufacturers and with smaller incentives the progress is slower.

[1]: https://www.bosch-mobility.com/en/solutions/sensors/front-ra...

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

#317

Post by crazygringo »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #312
crazygringo wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Put another way - would giving humans superhuman vision significantly reduce the accident rate? Yes? Incredibly? If people had 360° instant 3D awareness of all objects, that would avoid so many accidents. No more blind spots, no more missing objects because you were looking in one spot instead of another. No more missing dark objects at night. It would be a gigantic improvement in the rate of accidents.

You seem to be missing my point. Looking in one spot instead of another is included in what I’m calling “attention”. Of course paying attention to everything all the time would be and is a huge improvement. That is orthogonal to the type of vision tech being used. All approaches used in self driving systems today look everywhere all the time.

You were responding to a comment criticizing Musk for removing "radar/lidar".

So I'm assuming that the "superhuman vision" you described meant specifically if people had LIDAR, since that was the subject at hand.

LIDAR is superior to cameras because it much more accurately detects objects. It's an advantage all the time, and an especially huge advantage at night.

So LIDAR isn't orthogonal to anything. It's the entire point. If people had LIDAR, the accident rate would be significantly reduced.

You're arguing that LIDAR won't help cars, because by analogy it wouldn't help people if it was a native biological sense. But that's wrong.

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

#318

Post by plun9 »

ModernMech wrote: post #181
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…

I'm a roboticist who had learned from researchers involved in the 2007 DARPA urban challenge. The key takeaway from that event was that every single car that finished the race was equipped with the 3D velodyne LIDAR. It was that technology that enabled driverless cars to work as a concept. Why? Because it provided information that people had to infer, and that you couldn't easily get from camera. So absent the human…

Tesla's camera-based self-driving system is still likely at least five years away from being ready, Hall said. Still, he said, "Elon Musk is right about not needing lidar."

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2022/11/09/heres-wh...

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

#319

Post by Veserv »

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…

That number is incidents successfully detected, not ground truth. Last I looked, the majority of recorded fatalities went undetected by Tesla telematics. That demonstrates their accident detection/reporting is empirically incapable of producing a robust ground truth estimate. The number presented is a lower bound with no identifiable upper bound.

A upper bound could be easily produced by Tesla. All vehicle fatalities identified by police are recorded in the national Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) [1]. Tesla could investigate every recorded Tesla fatality by VIN and cross-reference with their telemetry to determine if their systems were available at all or active on or near the time of the fatal crash. This would cost them between a few thousand dollars to a few million dollars annually, depending on desired precision, which compared to the billions it makes annually is minuscule sum to affirmatively establish safety.

They intentionally choose to not do so. Instead deliberately deceiving consumers and the public by conflating the lower bound with a upper bound in all official safety messaging.

Even ignoring their gross incompetence or maliciousness in not doing simple safety analysis when numerous lives are on the line. The mere fact they conflate a lower bound with a upper bound in their messaging is scientific malfeasance of the highest order. Their reporting has zero credibility when they make such clear and intentional misreporting purely for their own benefit to the detriment of the public and even their own customers.

[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-report...

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

#320

Post by m3047 »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #51
pelagic_sky wrote: post #8

When I used to ride, getting rear ended at a stop was one of my biggest fears other than people blowing stop signs. I always left more space in front of me that would give me room to maneuver as I watched for the car behind me to make the stop.

I just want to compound on this one. If you get rear ended at a stoplight or stopsign it’s very likely the motorcyclist is not at fault. The motorcyclist suffers significantly more bodily injury than a car driver would in a similar collision. As a motorcyclist, you can tell that sometimes people just don’t see you because their brain is looking for something car shaped. When I ride, every time I stop at a stoplight o…

I put auto horns on my motorcycle(s). In the Seattle urban core (when I lived there, 15 years ago), if I honked then people looked for the car -- they weren't looking at me. Other than that, seems to have the intended effect.
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