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Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

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Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it currently really reduce fatalities if you control for car cost, age group and area driven? I‘m unconvinced of the current statistics.

Considering that tesla w/ autopilot enabled is less safe than tesla w/ autopilot disabled, I'm going to go with "no, if you control for those factors it doesn't reduce fatalities".

and how did you reach that conclusion?

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#132
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it currently really reduce fatalities if you control for car cost, age group and area driven? I‘m unconvinced of the current statistics.

Currently it is probably worse than the average driver. But here is a trolley problem for you. What is the ratio of people killed who volunteer to test out an auto-drive to the number of lives saved by that early testing? 1:1, 1:10, 1:100, 1:1000, 1:1,000,000? A million people die in vehicle wrecks each year.

The problem is that it's not just the drivers who are the volunteers getting killed. When you kill pedestrians as Uber did, they did not volunteer to be killed to test your software.

Yes automation is good, but Tesla is being needlessly reckless. They can easily be much more strict with the settings for auto-pilot but they're not.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it currently really reduce fatalities if you control for car cost, age group and area driven? I‘m unconvinced of the current statistics.

Considering that tesla w/ autopilot enabled is less safe than tesla w/ autopilot disabled, I'm going to go with "no, if you control for those factors it doesn't reduce fatalities".

Oh is that the case? How long is this known? In that case I find it should be taken off the market by the government.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But once you do that, it gets tricky to determine when you should ignore the "stationary object" and when you shouldn't. That's not tricky. You never ignore it. A stationary object means that you will have to either stop or turn. You don't know which one yet, but you definitely know you'll have to take an action. If you haven't decided by some close point, you just pick one.

But then the car will have a lot of false positives and it will stop now and then for every mundane thing that flies before the sensors. Every one of your customers ll be pissed, because the car cannot differentiate between debris on the road and a wall..Showing the true limitation the thing they call "Autopilot"... Tesla seems to have figured that, It is better to kill some of your customers then pissing every singl…

If the car has the slightest ability to follow lanes, it will choose "turn" and not stop until it gets hopelessly lost. At which point it only stops because it was avoiding certain disaster.

The dichotomy between ignore and stop is a false one.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#135
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in the current climate of "all new things must be super extra safe to be used, even if it displaces much worse technology", I think machine driving cars will have a hard time being accepted. Imagine the autopilot is 100 times safer than human drivers. Full implementation would mean about a fatality a day in the US. It does not seem this would be acceptable by the public even though 30,000 annual human car fatalit…

> It does not seem this would be acceptable by the public even though 30,000 annual human car fatalities could be avoided. The flawed assumption behind this thinking is that all accidents have "accidental" factors. Alcohol and drugs and the poor decisions of young men are _huge_ components of that statistic. You also have to consider that motorcycles make up a not insignificant portion (12%) of those numbers. It also…

And you also have older cars with less safety features, not sure how is in US but in other countries you can stil see old cars that are missing airbags.

So in fatalities statistics the fair thing is to compare Tesla with similar cars.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your point is "Autopilot only works on perfect roads" then they might have well pull the plug right now. Dirt, snow, rain, fog, dark, and other common conditions could obscure even correctly painted lines, and it just isn't realistic to expect perfect roads throughout such a large network anyway (in particular as human drivers can infer the line is meant to be there from the neighboring lines). At its core, a syst…

Man, that's incredibly bad. I drive that route all the time and it's not even remotely difficult to follow the highway there. Considering Tesla's must have driven through there hundreds of thousands of times, they should have data to make sure the car at least follows the highway. I don't crash in to a barrier when a paint stripe gets scuffed in between my Monday morning commute and my Tuesday morning commute.

It's not so simple - you can't simply follow the highway as you have done hundreds of thousands of times, because if the paint stripes have changed since Monday, then these might also be new (or temporary) stripes painted by a road construction crew overnight and you now must follow the new stripes.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But once you do that, it gets tricky to determine when you should ignore the "stationary object" and when you shouldn't. That's not tricky. You never ignore it. A stationary object means that you will have to either stop or turn. You don't know which one yet, but you definitely know you'll have to take an action. If you haven't decided by some close point, you just pick one.

As I understand it, what's hard is determining whether that stationary object is directly in front, or off to the side. Cars are always passing stationary objects on the sides.

That doesn't really change my answer. If an object is almost directly in front of you, you either fine-tune your turning to avoid it, or you stop.

There's no reason to ever ignore it.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't trust you to be able to snap out of a distracted state and take control of a car in a situation you may or may not have been paying attention to. I don't trust you to do that, I don't trust the driver behind me to do that, and I don't trust the drivers to the left and to the right of me to do that. I should not need to trust you -- if I trusted you, why would we need autopilot at all? Humans are either qualif…

1.3 million people a year die in car crashes. Humans are woefully unqualified to pilot heavy machinery on a daily basis. Tesla’s Autopilot reduces crashes by 40% according to the NHTSA, so I can’t agree with your binary argument. Whether you trust others is immaterial; statistics will be the final arbitor. If Autopilot still causes fatal accidents, but fewer fatal accidents than humans alone, how could you argue agai…

>> Tesla’s Autopilot reduces crashes by 40% according to the NHTSA

So does any car with automatic emergency braking and/or or forward collision warning (links below).

The problem here is, this Tesla drove head-on into the gore point. And previously, it drove right into the side of a huge truck. So... can it be trusted? Your call.

https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/automatic-emergen...

" IIHS data show rear-end collisions are cut by 50 percent on vehicles with AEB and FCW. "

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#139
post #53

I have now talked with two people who have autopilot in their model S's and both said the problem with autopilot is that it is "too good". Specifically it works completely correctly like 80 - 90% of the time and as a result, if you use it a lot, you start to expect it to be working and not fail. If it beeps then to tell you to take over, you have to mentally get back into the situational awareness of the road and the…

And in the current climate of "all new things must be super extra safe to be used, even if it displaces much worse technology", I think machine driving cars will have a hard time being accepted. Imagine the autopilot is 100 times safer than human drivers. Full implementation would mean about a fatality a day in the US. It does not seem this would be acceptable by the public even though 30,000 annual human car fatalit…

Nuclear power plants, plane crashes, terrorism, school shootings, even some rare diseases (the mad cow disease led to the slaughter of millions of cattle, having killed in the UK less than 200 people cumulatively, whereas the flu can easily kill 10,000 people in a single year just in the UK).

I don’t think it has anything to do with technology and automation. People are just very bad at reasoning with probabilities. This is why lotteries are so popular. And it is fuelled by unscrupulous (and even less apt at grasping probabilities) media trying to make money out of sensionalist headlines. How many times a week am I told that x will cause the end of the world, replace x by flu pandemics, Ebola, global warming, cancer as a result of eating meat or using smartphones, etc.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#140
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it currently really reduce fatalities if you control for car cost, age group and area driven? I‘m unconvinced of the current statistics.

I'm not reading a position in what you've said, but there is an observation here to draw out for the crowd. It doesn't matter all that much if after controlling for those variables it is relatively less safe; in absolute terms it just needs to be as safe as the worst human drivers. That is, we have an accepted safety standard - by definition, the worst human driver with a license. If a Tesla is safer than that, the r…

I don't agree with this position. Autopilot is a new thing that governments need to decide whether it's allowed or not (since it is operating dangerous equipment, so the state has an interest in doing the right thing). If improved safety is not a demonstrably valid argument for allowing it, it IMO doesn't pass the bar for what should be allowed. At that point it's purely a money-grabber from corporations that want the cookie (first to market with fully autonomous vehicles) without paying for it (heavy investment in testing).
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