Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

abc7news.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 581 posts

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

#141

Post by miskin »

Shank wrote: post #89
danso wrote: post #82

Currently, the Tesla autopilot page has this as its top headline: > Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars Followed by this: > All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver. http://web.archive.org/web/20180323054727/https://www.tesla.... Getting past the arguments of whether T…

> Getting past the arguments of whether Tesla should be calling this "Autopilot", is its claims about hardware true? Tesla actually hasn't called that Autopilot -- they refer to it as "full self driving" and not in the same category. But...is it true? It's vaporware right now, so we can't really say. Obviously, in a purely hypothetical landscape, even with cameras you should be able to emulate what humans can do and…

"Autopilot" is the name of the page that danso referred to, is in the title of that page and is used on the page 9 times. How would you possibly not recognize this as name of the feature?

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

#142

Post by rimliu »

njarboe wrote: post #70
m_mueller wrote: post #61

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.

If you are talking about the world a large part of that million are killed on the roads where no self-driving car would be able to drive anyway. Also "normal" drivers do not usually get killed in crashes—unless it involves reckless driving. So probably self-driving is safer than drunk driving, reckless driving or driving on the roads with the extremely poor infrastructure, but compared to responsible driving? Also, why is this so black-and white? The safest current option is technology assisted driving, but no much talk about it.

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

#143

Post by mirimir »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #137
mirimir wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As I understand it, Tesla autopilot can't distinguish objects on the sides (such as road signs) from objects directly in front. And it must ignore road signs etc. So it ends up ignoring all stationary objects.

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

#145

Post by m_mueller »

njarboe wrote: post #70
m_mueller wrote: post #61

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.

I'm just throwing something at the wall here: Just start with a purely assistive package like most big manufacturers have. Let buyers opt-in to a test program (giving them, say, a 3% reduction on the list price), where all their inputs and outputs are recorded and sent to the manufacturer. Manufacturer can now assimilate that data into a model of car and road and test their fully autonomous software on that model and search for situations where the software gave much different input compared to the human driver. Check these situations in an automated way and/or manually to see whether it's a software error or improvement. IMO this approach would have had a high chance to find the bugs that caused the two recent fatalities, as I'm convinced that most human drivers would have done better there.

After years of doing this (which seems to be close to what Waymo is doing if I understand correctly), the autonmous software should be way better than what is being pushed out now by Tesla and Uber (and probably a bunch of others).

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

#146

Post by planb »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #93
Someone1234 wrote: post #5

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…

> If your point is "Autopilot only works on perfect roads" then they might have well pull the plug right now. It's even worse: wait until someone does something malicious to an autopilot car to cause it to crash/kill. I hate to be so cynical, but if you're developing this stuff, you have to imagine worst case scenarios. And there are much much worse scenarios when malice is involved.

https://xkcd.com/1958/

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

#147

Post by cm2187 »

simion314 wrote: post #135
akira2501 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That’s a good point. Not just airbags. It starts to be common to have cars that apply the brakes automatically when they anticipate a collision. I think some research has been done on cars being designed to do less damage to a pedestrian in a collision, I don’t know if it has lead to design changes. Self driving cars may end up being only marginally safer than other new cars.

But safety is not in my opinion the main rationale for self driving cars. Convenience and maximisation of traffic are.

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

#148

Post by sho_hn »

icc97 wrote: post #111
tlrobinson wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant quote from an article about the Air France 447 crash: > To put it briefly, automation has made it more and more unlikely that ordinary airline pilots will ever have to face a raw crisis in flight—but also more and more unlikely that they will be able to cope with such a crisis if one arises. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-... (linked to from another HN post today: https://news.yc…

Airline pilot training is designed to handle this, as well as they have a co-pilot who prevents them from being distracted and is able to take over if they are distracted. Tesla is just handing it out to anyone who can afford to buy a Model S/X (and now Model 3) with the absolute minimum of warnings that they can get away with.

I would not be surprised if Musk coldly responded that this is a known problem with no solution, but autopilot still lowers the death rate on average. In other words, for the proponents it's a trade-off.

And also the idea that an automatic driver is easier to improve over time (skewing the trade-off better and better) than human drivers. Which of course will snowball when reliance on automation keeps making drivers worse than better, and at some point you're past the point of no return.

Whether that's right data must show.

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

#149

Post by venomsnake »

icc97 wrote: post #111
tlrobinson wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant quote from an article about the Air France 447 crash: > To put it briefly, automation has made it more and more unlikely that ordinary airline pilots will ever have to face a raw crisis in flight—but also more and more unlikely that they will be able to cope with such a crisis if one arises. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-... (linked to from another HN post today: https://news.yc…

Airline pilot training is designed to handle this, as well as they have a co-pilot who prevents them from being distracted and is able to take over if they are distracted. Tesla is just handing it out to anyone who can afford to buy a Model S/X (and now Model 3) with the absolute minimum of warnings that they can get away with.

I think you misunderstand the GP - he is stating that - even if pilots with their rigorous training can make such disastrous mistakes, with car autopilots it will be way worse.

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

#150

Post by Tempest1981 »

bobsil1 wrote: post #3

Gore point stripe faded: https://imgur.com/a/xHq57 Street View: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.6346515,-122.104109,3a,75y,8...

Here is where the Mountain View 85/101 crash occurred. Pictures taken this week:

https://m.imgur.com/a/acAL8

More faded than the last StreetView pics.

I also wonder if the line -- where the asphalt meets concrete -- contributed. Maybe it looked like the shoulder. Granted, there is also a yellow line.

Post reply on HN