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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

#321
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

Let's also keep in mind that a few poor executions implementing control systems doesn't mean all of control system theory is bad...

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

#322
post #81
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. The car should be smart enough to figure out which sensor is faulty. Otherwise, the car should not be driving itself at all. It's more like, a pilot has access to multiple sensors. Which they do.

I think you and GP are in agreement. If you have a sensor with a really bad .5 chance of failure, by having to your chance of failure decreases to 0.5^2=0.25.

if fails are independent...

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

#323
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Subaru has done this many times, and with regular cars, not motorcycles.

Your car has accelerated into a person many times and yet you continue to use this feature/car?

Find me a car with autonomous capabilities (e.g. adaptive cruise control) that never does it, and I'll consider it.

As all car manufacturers point out: A prerequisite to enabling any safety mechanism is that the driver overrides when it fails. This includes blind spot detection, lane drift detection/correction, and adaptive cruise control. It is understood that when I enable it, I'm responsible for its behavior given that I can override it.

But that's all an aside. The point isn't that I continue to drive it, but that this is not something special about Teslas.

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

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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 mista…

The question was:

> Put another way - would giving humans superhuman vision significantly reduce the accident rate?

I'm saying that human vision is not the cause of most accidents. Most accidents are caused by distraction, incorrect decisions/errors of judgement, road conditions, etc.

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

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 me…

I was talking about radar

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

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Radars are not as good as you think. They generally can't detect stationary objects, have problems with reflections, most of them are VERY low resolution, and so on. The "with almost perfect accuracy and very little false positives" part is not true. If you look at euroncap data, you'll see how most cars are not close to 100 in Safety Assist category (and Teslas with just vision are among the top). And these EuroNCAP…

> 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…

They can detect stationary objects, yes. But there's so much clutter from things like overpasses, road signs, and other objects that confuse the radar, that for things like adaptive cruise control, stationary objects are often intentionally filtered out or assigned much lower priority. So you detect moving objects (which stand out because of doppler shift).

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

#327
post #66
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without knowing how many FSD miles Teslas have done compared to other brands, it's hard to judge. It could just be that Tesla owners are far more likely to trust and use their cars FSD capabilities, and thus end up in more FSD accidents. Other brands might have so bad FSD that people simply not trust it and basically never use it, and thus never get into an FSD accident.

I don’t see any way you can spin this in a positive light. Yeah, there may be many more FSD miles on Tesla, but if that leads to a bunch of motorcyclists getting hit, then maybe that’s exactly the problem. We know this is one of the core issues of Tesla FSD: its capabilities have been hyped and over promised time and time again. We have countless examples of drivers trusting it far more than they should. And who’s to…

> Yeah, there may be many more FSD miles on Tesla, but if that leads to a bunch of motorcyclists getting hit, then maybe that’s exactly the problem.

I'd wager far more motorcyclists get hit by humans driving non-Teslas in non-autonomous modes. I could rephrase your comment to:

"Yeah, but if humans drive cars without safety features, and that leads to a bunch of motorcyclists getting hit, then maybe that’s exactly the problem."

... to make the (faulty[1]) argument that driving with FSD turned on is better for motorcyclists.

[1] Faulty not because it's false, but because it is a logical fallacy.

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

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did deliver on several fronts for a long time and seemed like a serious person. But people can change, and not always for the better. But yeah, like Sam Harris says now, perhaps I didn't know the real Musk.

He seemed like a serious person when he called a cave diver as a pedo guy (more than six months ago)? Maybe you need to rethink what "serious" means to you if all that matters is "delivering". Have some better morals.

Being an idiot in Twitter has never meant anything. That's the crux here, really: Musk has proven quite recently that his Twitter persona reflected his actual being.

People accusing me and others of "you understand this only now?" are full of shit. You didn't know, just like me. Holier than thou is distasteful.

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

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mista…

The question was: > Put another way - would giving humans superhuman vision significantly reduce the accident rate? I'm saying that human vision is not the cause of most accidents. Most accidents are caused by distraction, incorrect decisions/errors of judgement, road conditions, etc.

And I'm saying a ton of those "incorrect decisions/errors of judgement" would no longer exist if we had superhuman LIDAR abilities.

You're using existing human vision as your baseline, which is not the right comparison here. The question is a baseline of superhuman abilities. So there's a ton of accidents we wouldn't get into if we had those superhuman abilities.

Basically everything involving a collision with an object we weren't aware of in time because it wasn't in our limited field of view and wasn't well-lit, that could have been avoided if we had been. Which is a decent proportion of accidents.

But the bigger, original point is that LIDAR is better than cameras, and better for avoiding accidents.

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

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple independent sensor streams is like having multiple pilots fly a plane instead of just one pilot. The chance of a fatal error (false negative identification of an object near the car) decreases from p to p^n. The size of that decrease is not intuitive: if p=0.0001 it now becomes a much smaller number with the introduction of a second pilot or second independent sensor stream (0.0001^2). Now the errors are not…

I thought it was consensus that the move away from lidar was driven by a lack of supply compared to desired EV production numbers, and the things said about making vision only work have all been about coping with that reality.

At the time, Lidar cost about $80k for the main unit.
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