If Tesla autopilot relies on good quality road markings, then it's not yet usable in 80% of the world.
I agree. I think this technology needs smart roads to succeed, whatever this entails.
Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier
101–110 of 481 posts
Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not usable anywhere. What if I draw a fake line on the road? will it follow it? what if you have wet paint and another vehicle smudges it diagonally to the lane?
When I was a kid there was a cartoon where a truck painting a white line in the middle of the road, drove off a cliff for some reason (and therefore, so did the line). The punchline was that all the other cars also fell off the cliff because they were following the line instead of looking at the road. It's crazy to think, that's where we are now with so-called self-driving cars.
When I was a kid there was a computer game called Lemmings...
What if all the connected autoupdating self driving cars suddenly learn to follow each other off a cliff in pursuit of an optimisation gone wrong.
It would be ironic if the Bulterian Jihad[1] were kicked off as a result of Elon Musk's machinations.
Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not usable anywhere. What if I draw a fake line on the road? will it follow it? what if you have wet paint and another vehicle smudges it diagonally to the lane?
Exactly. This is what I’ve been saying. It is so dangerous. I love Tesla but I think autopilot is currently a death trap.
Naive centering certainly is. That's exactly what caused this behavior. Just about any scenario where the car tries to split the difference between widening lane lines has the potential of causing this problem.
To make matters worse, it's trivial to run across a case where the road curves AND splits, causing the 'neutral' path to go straight into a barrier… which is exactly what's seen in the video. The straight path would be toward the split-off road, but it veers slightly to the right before splitting.
Makes me wonder if GPS can play a role in determining whether the lane markings are liable to seduce the autopilot into splitting the difference. Given established roads, the car should have some clue this scenario is approaching. If we can see a 'V' approaching on a simple freaking Garmin, the car ought to be able to have that information.
Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier
#104One of the great things about self driving cars is that we are going to start "debugging Roads". From my point of view all accidents until this time could be attributed to the civil engineer that build the road as much as the driver of the car. You make a pedestrian pass between roads made only for aesthetic purposes so you put a sign forbidding the pass and call it done. But people of course use it and get killed. Y…
> something you won't find in any European high speed road without deflectors that will make vehicles not crash against concrete.
You find those on the German highway between Berlin and Poland, for example.
> From my point of view all accidents until this time could be attributed to the civil engineer that build the road as much as the driver of the car.
On the other hand, other solutions would provide other "bugs", to stick with your terminology.
>Self driving will give us scientific evidence of what creates accidents like black boxes did with airplanes.
No, it will only give us data on what causes accidents for self-driving cars. Most new cars apparently are already fitted with EDRs[0], the only difference with self-driving cars is the number if sensors involved.
Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier
#105AV driving seems to be ripe for disruption
This is such a gross techie statement. No it’s not. Human life is on the line, this is actual engineering. This isn’t writing some stupid social app on MongoDB written in JavaScript over the weekend.
Google has been at this for years, and with far better sensors, and even they aren’t there yet.
Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. This is what I’ve been saying. It is so dangerous. I love Tesla but I think autopilot is currently a death trap.
> I think autopilot is currently a death trap. I think this is a bit of an exaggeration. As long as the driver keeps paying attention and uses it as a driving aid, not a driver replacement, everything is fine. It's the moment that people start relying on it doing something that it wasn't built for, that the problems arise.
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Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One of the great things about self driving cars is that we are going to start "debugging Roads". We've been debugging roads since Roman times. This is mostly about debugging software, and even more about crappy software development processes. After all, if your update is not monotonically improving things you have a real problem if your product is mission critical and lives are at stake.
also, roads are far harder to debug and fix then software
I would not be so sure of that. Self driving in all conditions is hard. The thing that bugs me is that these '90%' solutions are released on the unsuspecting public without some serious plain language about the software capabilities and what could be expected. Marketing should not trump safety, especially not the safety of people not buying the product.
Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier
#108This kind of video makes me wonder: what is the "autopilot" feature actually for? Do people generally like it? (I don't own a Tesla and I've never driven one.) If you're supposed to keep your hands on the wheel, and given videos like this that show you really need to keep your hands on the wheel and pay attention, is automatic steering really that big of a deal? Cruise control, now, that really is useful because it a…
I think Tesla is losing out here by calling what is little more than adaptive cruise control plus lanekeeping "autopilot." Adaptive cruise control + lanekeeping + collision avoidance is available on a ton of cars now, even economy cars, and it works great. I regularly make a ~200 mile drive on the Honda system and it is 100% the whole way. But when you sell it as Autopilot instead of driver assist, people have much h…
My concern is, if you have both cruise control and lanekeeping, what's left to keep your attention and stop you zoning out?
I don't find steering onerous, but it requires just enough attention to keep you alert.
(I've never used a lanekeeping system, though. Maybe I'd like it, I dunno)
Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that's exactly what makes Tesla PR so disingenuous, they know better than anybody what updates they did and how often their updated software passed that point and yet they will happily cite numbers they know to be wrong. So, now regarding that previous crash: did that driver (or should I say occupant) get lulled into a false sense of security because he'd been through there many times in the past and it worked un…
I've got to take issue with you there. Tesla Engineering knows better than anybody what updates they did and how often they update etc. Tesla PR knows nothing about what updates the engineering team did. At least some people in Tesla PR probably don't even know the cars update their software regularly. It's bad practice for them to speak out of turn, but I can absolutely see the PR team not having a good grasp of wha…
I'm sorry but Tesla PR == Tesla. If they don't have a good grasp on this they should STFU until they do. That would make Tesla even worse in my book.
Their job is not to put out the best numbers possible, their job is to inform. Most likely they were more worried about the effect of their statement on their stock price than they were worried about public safety.
If they do put out numbers (such as 85K trips past that point) then it is clear that they have access to engineering data with a very high resolution, it would be very bad if they only used that access to search for numbers that bolster their image.
Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
humans at least are aware that they made a mistake and can avoid collision. Tesla makes no mistake, tesla has no idea whats going on so you cannot call it a mistake. Its not a bug, its a feature.
Except it gets reported back to HQ and like with airline accidents, the systems are updated across-the-board so that the risk of future occurrences is greatly reduced. So instead of a single human learning "gee, shouldn't do that again", 100k+ vehicles learn about it.
"Don't worry, an update will fix it" is a cold comfort when an OTA update broke it in the first place.