NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash • Hacker News Board

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#101

Post by microtherion » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:34 PM UTC

jfrankamp wrote: post #74

Animats wrote: post #42

NTSB: • At 8 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was following a lead vehicle and was traveling about 65 mph. • At 7 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla began a left steering movement while following a lead vehicle. • At 4 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was no longer following a lead vehicle. • At 3 seconds prior to the crash and up to the time of impact with the crash attenuator, the Tesla’s speed increas…

To follow on, there has already been reported autopilot drifting and mismanaging that spot on the freeway (although without this catastrophic result). That fact adds to this description/explanation. Aside: the following another car heuristic is dumb. It's ultimately offloading the AI/decision making work onto another agent, an unknown agent. You could probably have a train of teslas following eachother following a du…

> the following another car heuristic is dumb.

It's the Machine Learning equivalent of Zen navigation: http://dirkgently.wikia.com/wiki/Zen_navigation

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#102

Post by xab9 » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:34 PM UTC

Maybestring wrote: post #25

MBCook wrote: post #3

“[Driver’s] hands were not detected on the steering wheel for the final six seconds prior to the crash. Tesla has said that Huang received warnings to put his hands on the wheel, but according to the NTSB, these warnings came more than 15 minutes before the crash.” This kind of stuff is why I’ve lost all faith in Tesla’s public statements. What they said here was, for all intents and purposes, a flat out lie. Clearly…

>This kind of stuff is why I’ve lost all faith in Tesla’s public statements. I don't understand why they would issue any statement other than, 'condolences, we're committed to safety, we're working with the NTSB to understand what happened'

Money.

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#103

Post by cornholio » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:35 PM UTC

jakelarkin wrote: post #14

self driving systems cant well reason about untrained scenarios or the intent of other humans on the road. I think the people have grossly underestimated how driving in an uncontrolled environment is really a general AI problem, which we're not even close to solving.

> driving in an uncontrolled environment is really a general AI problem

Is it? Unless you are talking about NASCAR, an adversarial game where rational agents compete for road space, driving is essentially a physics problem: maintain a speed and direction that does not exceed the vehicle's ability to correct them so as to avoid any stationary or mobile obstacle.

In this case, the vehicle was accelerated to a speed (72mph) that far exceeded its safety speed against oncoming stationary barriers (0mph).

I concede that discerning what is an obstacle and what is drivable road surface is a hard computer vision problem, hence the tendency to simplify it using 3D data, radar/lidar etc. But still, not quite general AI.

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#104

Post by intherdfield » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:35 PM UTC

jakobegger wrote: post #5

MBCook wrote: post #3

“[Driver’s] hands were not detected on the steering wheel for the final six seconds prior to the crash. Tesla has said that Huang received warnings to put his hands on the wheel, but according to the NTSB, these warnings came more than 15 minutes before the crash.” This kind of stuff is why I’ve lost all faith in Tesla’s public statements. What they said here was, for all intents and purposes, a flat out lie. Clearly…

Also, „hands were not detected“ does not mean that they really weren‘t on the wheel. Maybe someone who drives a Tesla can comment on how reliable the hand detection is.

This came up last month and a Tesla driver had this to say.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16822623

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#105

Post by zo1 » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:36 PM UTC

raldi wrote: post #76

Animats wrote: post #42

NTSB: • At 8 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was following a lead vehicle and was traveling about 65 mph. • At 7 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla began a left steering movement while following a lead vehicle. • At 4 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was no longer following a lead vehicle. • At 3 seconds prior to the crash and up to the time of impact with the crash attenuator, the Tesla’s speed increas…

> The paint on the right edge of the gore marking, as seen in Google Maps, is worn Indeed; here's a close-up of the critical area. Note that the darker stripe on the bottom of the photo is NOT the crucial one; the one that the car was supposed to follow is the much more faded one above that that you can barely see: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.410912,-122.0757037,3a,75y,2... (Note that I'm not blaming the faded pa…

Wow. The start of that concrete lane-divider looks incredibly dangerous for a highway. It pretty-much just "starts", with only some sort of object that they call a "crash attenuator" in front of it. I would imagine its purpose is to dampen/dissipate kinetic energy and maybe deflect oncoming objects from hitting the concrete slab directly.

I don't even see any sort of road-bumps to warn drivers of this dangerous obstacle approaching.

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#106

Post by dboreham » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:36 PM UTC

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #57

After this incident and Tesla's response to it, I hope Tesla is sued and or fined into bankruptcy. Tesla is normalizing releasing not fully tested software to do safety-critical things, and literally killing people as a result. A message needs to be sent that this is unacceptable. In addition, their first response is a PR driven response that sought to blame to driver, and violated NTSB procedures. Safety is probably…

And a helpful lesson for all the "excessive government regulation" people.

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#107

Post by stefan_ » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:36 PM UTC

ckastner wrote: post #59

Animats wrote: post #42

NTSB: • At 8 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was following a lead vehicle and was traveling about 65 mph. • At 7 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla began a left steering movement while following a lead vehicle. • At 4 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was no longer following a lead vehicle. • At 3 seconds prior to the crash and up to the time of impact with the crash attenuator, the Tesla’s speed increas…

> This is the Tesla self-crashing car in action. Remember how it works. It visually recognizes rear ends of cars using a BW camera I'm sure Tesla's engineers are qualified and it is certainly easy to second-guess them, but it is beyond me why they would even consider a BW camera in a context where warning colors (red signs, red cones, black and yellow stripes, etc.) are an essential element of the domain.

You can have different cameras for sign recognition if you can't deal without color. But BW cameras have huge benefits from sensitivity in the optics all the way to processing power in the backend without much downside.

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#108

Post by roywiggins » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:36 PM UTC

MBCook wrote: post #87

stetrain wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gore zone did not have a striped area, just solid lines on each side. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5582461/Tesla... Edit: Google street view of the location: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.410912,-122.0757037,3a,75y,2...

Ah. I wonder if they do recognize the stripes then. BTW does anyone know why it’s called a ‘gore’ zone? I can see it being a (brutal) nickname but I’m hoping there is some better reason.

"A gore (British English: nose),[1] refers to a triangular piece of land. Etymologically it is derived from gār, meaning spear."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gore_(road)

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#109

Post by thomasfortes » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:39 PM UTC

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #57

After this incident and Tesla's response to it, I hope Tesla is sued and or fined into bankruptcy. Tesla is normalizing releasing not fully tested software to do safety-critical things, and literally killing people as a result. A message needs to be sent that this is unacceptable. In addition, their first response is a PR driven response that sought to blame to driver, and violated NTSB procedures. Safety is probably…

Yeah, I can accept that some startups live by "move fast and break things", after all, if I think that their approach is dangerous for me I can choose to not be involved, I can't say the same about being run over by a car that has shitty hardware/software.

Autopilot software that are not safer than human pilots shouldn't be allowed to be sold to the general public until they fix their stuff. And even if they are safer most of the time, we are at least used to how human drivers react, most of them don't accelerate just before a crash.

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#110

Post by slg » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 5:40 PM UTC

rhacker wrote: post #49

martin_bech wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A counter argument that HUMAN DRIVERS are unsafe an fatal (let alone missing common sense and alertness). I 100% get your point, but my counterpoint, is that this is what we are going to see, in the future. Autonomous systems that by and large are way safer, than human drivers, but when they fail, the might do so, in circumstances where are human would not. Humans are good at some things, computers/ai/sensor suites a…

I get that in 5-10 years we MAY have SDVs that are superior than human drivers. But I think a lot of people have a mental model of SDVs _right now_ being superior to human drivers. I can't remember the crash stats, but I think the only way to know for sure is to calculate the number of miles a single human generally drives on average before they are involved in a collision or crash, etc... Now I don't have the number…

We don't have exact numbers for Tesla but there are 2 confirmed casualties in what is conservatively over a billion Autopilot miles. The average casualty rate for human drivers is something around 1.25 death per 100 million miles. Those numbers are not directly comparable given that Autopilot is not something that is used during 100% of all driving miles and Tesla drivers are not average car drivers. However, there is nothing that screams "Teslas with Autopilot are a death trap" like some people in this thread are implying.