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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

#341
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We are probably in the weeds here but there is a difference between notification safety mechanisms and ones that take action. And to get really pedantic, emergency breaking doesn't permit user override (either functionally or simply because of how abrupt it is).

And autonomy features are a different domain altogether.

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

#342
post #20

This problem has been solved more than a decade ago by radar sensors (standard on many mid-range cars at the time). They detect imminent collisions with almost perfect accuracy and very little false positives. Having better sensor data is always going to beat trying to massage crappy data into something useful.

This isn't true. You can try using adaptive cruise control with lane-keeping on a radar-equipped car on an undivided highway. Radar is good at detecting distance and velocity, but can't see lane lines. In order to prevent collisions, you would need to know precisely the road geometry and lane positions, which may come from camera data, and combine that information with the vehicle information.

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

#343

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.

> when the Sun is low on the horizon, all Teslas are effectively blind.

Looking at the camera preview screen on a Tesla with the Sun in frame is all you need to do to prove that false.

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

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The base rate was discussed early in the article, but not by that name: > It’s not just that self-driving cars in general are dangerous for motorcycles, either: this problem is unique to Tesla. Not a single other automobile manufacturer or ADAS self-driving technology provider reported a single motorcycle fatality in the same time frame.

That gives you absolute rate, but not relative rate. There are not many other cars out there (in comparison), with a self-driving mode. There are so many Teslas in the World out there driving around, that I think you'd have to considerably multiply all the others combined to get close to that number. As such, while 5 > 0, and that's a problem, what we don't know (and perhaps can't know), is how that adjusts for popul…

“ADAS self-driving technology”

ADAS is fairly common. It was in my VW and BMW, and I’m certain many other cars have it too.

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There is also risk as Chevy already deprecated their first gen "FSD", leaving early adopters with gimped ability and shutout from future expansions. Tesla has already said that some of its vehicles, sold with “all the hardware necessary for FSD” will never get it.

> Tesla has already said that some of its vehicles, sold with “all the hardware necessary for FSD” will never get it.

No they didn't. They said it turned out the vehicles didn't have all the hardware necessary, but that a free retrofit to add it will be forthcoming.

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

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make." — Lord Farquaad, Shrek , https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126029/characters/nm0001475?it...

The irony is almost palpable, invoking this quote against a system that is driving 600 million miles a quarter without the 8 deaths a human would cause over the same distance.

[dead]

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

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How good can it be if it rear ends motorcycles?

This. People arguing over base rates of motorcycle accidents as if Tesla didn't get fooled by a loony tunes wall. If Waymo had killed 5 motorcyclists in SF we would know. But they operate there without an incident for years. Meanwhile, Tesla just after releasing autopilot to the world a man is decapitated because the system is deficient. Then it happened again in 2016 under eerily similar circumstance. Then we observ…

> as if Tesla didn't get fooled by a loony tunes wall

Important distinction: FSD didn't get fooled by a looney tunes wall. Legacy Autopilot did.

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

#348

Visual detection only doesn’t work and the man that forced Tesla to use it is now in control of government “efficiency”. This decade’s very dark humor just keeps getting worse.

Been driving my new model Y with FSD since Monday and it's really cool works great. Just drove from home to a restaurant without touching the steering wheel. It does work I'm livin it.

and it drove me back just now, flawlessly. i must be living in an alternate reality to these "journalists". they are so transparent about why they write this stuff hahaha

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

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is almost palpable, invoking this quote against a system that is driving 600 million miles a quarter without the 8 deaths a human would cause over the same distance.

The argument here isn't against self-driving. Flying is also 100x safer than driving, but there's still real value in continuing to use the best technology we have available to make flying even safer. "Not a single other automobile manufacturer or ADAS self-driving technology provider reported a single motorcycle fatality in the same time frame."

> there's still real value in continuing to use the best technology we have available to make flying even safer.

That's true, but it would obviously be completely unreasonable to stop all flying in the meantime.

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

#350
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human vision isn't good enough, though. Otherwise why not just drive the car yourself?

>Human vision isn't good enough, though. Maybe if your standard is "scheduled commercial passenger flights" level of safety. >Otherwise why not just drive the car yourself? There's plenty of reasons why humans can be more dangerous outside of vision quality. For instance, being distracted, poor reaction times, or not being able to monitor all angles simultaneously.

> For instance, being distracted, poor reaction times, or not being able to monitor all angles simultaneously.

As a pitch for self driving, it's going to be a long time before I trust a computer to do the above better than I do. At the very least adding sensors I don't have access to will give me assurance the car won't drive into a wall with a road painted on it. I don't know how on earth you'd market self-driving as competent without being absurdly conservative about what functionality you claim to be able to deliver. Aggregate statistics about safety aren't going to make me feel emotionally stable when I am familiar with how jerky and skittish the driving is under visually confusing driving conditions.

Perhaps vision is sufficient, but it seems hopelessly optimistic to expect to be able to pitch it without some core improvement over human driving (aside from my ability to take the hand off the wheel while driving).

Edit: hilariously, there's already a video demonstrating this exact scenario: https://youtu.be/IQJL3htsDyQ

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