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U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#181

Post by _ph_ »

myko wrote: post #140

I don't know how Tesla ever presumes to achieve FSD when they cannot detect stopped objects in the road, especially emergency vehicles. This is incredibly disappointing. Does anyone know if the FSD Beta has this ability?

All these crashes happened with the radar-controlled auto pilot. A radar system basically cannot detect static obstactles, as it doesn't have the spacial resolution to distinguish an obstacle in your lane from something right beside or above it (bridges). They can only use the radar to follow other cars, because these are not stationary objects.

Recently, Tesla switched from radar-based to pure optical obstacle recognition. This should vastly improve this kind of behavior. Ironically that the investigation starts at a moment when they basically got rid of the old system.

Look on youtube for videos of the FSD beta. It is amazingly good at recognizing the surroundings of a car, including parked vehicles at the road side.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#182

Post by leroman »

young_unixer wrote: post #176
leroman wrote: post #78

Seeing all the near-misses and life saving interventions on YouTube involving Tesla vehicles, 1 death seems not such a bad result.. The question should be - how many lives were saved by this system vs how many would die if driven "normally"?

I don't think that should be the question. For example: it's not morally equivalent to die while drunk driving at 150 km/h vs dying as a pedestrian because someone ran over you. I would prefer 10 drunk drivers die instead of just one innocent person.

There's a place for a discussion about the moral repercussions, I doubt it's a 10 drunk driver vs 1 soccer mom situation ;)

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#183

Post by lastofthemojito »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #27

I drive a lot across Europe: as in, really a lot, long trip across several countries, several times a year. I drive enough on the highways to know a few scary situations, like the truck driver in a big curve slightly deviating out of his lane and "pushing" me dangerously close to the median strip for example. To me driving requires paying constant attention to the road and being always ready to act swiftly: I just do…

I learned this playing Gran Turismo video games way back when. The game has long endurance races (I seem to remember races that ran about 2 hours, but there may have been longer ones). Eventually you get hungry or thirsty or have to use the bathroom, so you pause the game, take care of business, and resume. It's really easy to screw up if the game was paused while your car was doing anything other than stable, straight travel. A turn that I successfully handled 100 times before can suddenly feel foreign and challenging if I resume there with little context.

Obviously that's not exactly the same thing as taking over for a real car when the driver assistance features give up, but seems similarly challenging to take over the controls at the most precarious moment of travel, without being sort of "warmed up" as a driver.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#184

Post by guerby »

There is about 36000 death on the road per year in the USA for 280 millions vehicles, that's 128.5 death/million vehicule/year

If we assume the number of tesla autopilot death double this year to 8 (from 4 at the time of probe launch), for about 900 thousand tesla on the road in USA, that's 8.9 autopilot death/million tesla/year.

Ratio between the numbers of 14.4.

Tesla reporting says for Q1 2021 one crash on autopilot per 4.19 millions miles vs one crash per 484 thousand miles all vehicules.

Ratio between the numbers of 8.7

All numbers are full of biases and their ratio probably aren't that meaningful but they end up in the same magnitude.

Interesting data there "Fatality Facts 2019 Urban/rural comparison":

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/urban...

"Although 19 percent of people in the U.S. live in rural areas and 30 percent of the vehicle miles traveled occur in rural areas, almost half of crash deaths occur there. "

I was shocked that in the USA in 2019 about 40-46% of all road death people were unbelted, while 90% of front seat people wear seat belts according to observation studies.

Incidentally tesla car will beep to no end if weight is detected on a seat and seat belt isn't clicked: I have to click the seat belt when I put my (not so heavy) bag on the passenger seat since there's no software option to disable the beeping.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#185

Post by Brakenshire »

Retric wrote: post #158
ghaff wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nothing (well certainly not everything) to do with people's assumptions. There's a ton of research around how people simply stop paying attention when there's no reason for them to pay attention 99% of the time. It doesn't even need to be about them pulling out a book or watching a movie. It can simply be zoning out. Maybe, as you say, it's feasible today or soon to better handle brief distractions but once you…

We have empirical data showing how safe actual level 2 self driving cars are in practice. So there’s no reason to work from base assumptions. Yes, level 2 self driving cars cause avoidable accidents, but overall rate is very close to the rate people do. The only way that’s happing is they are causing and preventing roughly similar numbers of accidents. Which means people are either paying enough attention or these se…

> We have empirical data showing how safe actual level 2 self driving cars are in practice.

Do we? Where does that come from? The data Tesla provides is hopelessly non-representative because it makes the assumption that the safety of any given road is independent of whether a driver chooses to switch on the system there.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#186

Post by dmix »

phoe18 wrote: post #4

> "The involved subject vehicles were all confirmed to have been engaged in either Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control during the approach to the crashes," No mention of the deceptive marketing name "Full Self Driving" in the article.

I checked the website and they seem to be contextualizing "Full-self driving" with it coming at a future date:

> All new Tesla cars have the hardware needed in the future for full self-driving in almost all circumstances. [...] As these self-driving capabilities are introduced, your car will be continuously upgraded through over-the-air software updates.

https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/autopilot

I also personally would prefer they stuck to 'autopilot' and avoided the word full in 'full self-driving' and otherwise be more specific about what it means.

Other car companies typically productize the various features like lane assist, following cruise control, etc rather than bundle it into one. But that definitely makes communicating it more difficult.

Tesla probably doesn't want to call it 'limited self-driving' or 'partial self-driving'. Maybe 'computer assisted driving' but that doesn't sound as appealing. I can see the difficulty marketing here. But again not using 'full' as in it's complete and ready-to-go would help.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#187

Post by malwrar »

zemptime wrote: post #165
TacticalCoder wrote: post #27

I drive a lot across Europe: as in, really a lot, long trip across several countries, several times a year. I drive enough on the highways to know a few scary situations, like the truck driver in a big curve slightly deviating out of his lane and "pushing" me dangerously close to the median strip for example. To me driving requires paying constant attention to the road and being always ready to act swiftly: I just do…

I see a lot of comments here postulating how autopilot is a terribly designed feature from people who appear not to be speaking from first hand experience and now I feel compelled to comment, exactly following that HN pattern someone posted about how HN discussions go. That said thanks for keeping this discussion focused & framed as a system design one, doesn't feel like a Tesla hate train so I feel comfortable hoppi…

This expresses the mindset I find myself in when I use Autopilot. It's like enabling cruise control, you're still watching traffic around you but now you don't need to focus on maintaining the correct speed or worry about keeping your car perfectly in a lane. You can more or less let the car handle that (with your hands on the wheel to guard against the occasional jerky maneuver when a lane widens for example) while you focus on the conditions around you.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#188

Post by gugagore »

zemptime wrote: post #165
TacticalCoder wrote: post #27

I drive a lot across Europe: as in, really a lot, long trip across several countries, several times a year. I drive enough on the highways to know a few scary situations, like the truck driver in a big curve slightly deviating out of his lane and "pushing" me dangerously close to the median strip for example. To me driving requires paying constant attention to the road and being always ready to act swiftly: I just do…

I see a lot of comments here postulating how autopilot is a terribly designed feature from people who appear not to be speaking from first hand experience and now I feel compelled to comment, exactly following that HN pattern someone posted about how HN discussions go. That said thanks for keeping this discussion focused & framed as a system design one, doesn't feel like a Tesla hate train so I feel comfortable hoppi…

Some people activate cruise control and then rest their right foot on the floor. I activate cruise control whenever possible because while it is activated, I can drive with my foot resting on the brake pedal. I like being marginally more responsive to an event that requires braking since I don’t need to move my foot from the accelerator.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#189

Post by dawnerd »

judge2020 wrote: post #14
crubier wrote: post #9

Predictable outcome of a sensing system fully based on deep learning. Rare unusual situations don't have enough training data and lead to unpredictable output. I still think that Tesla's approach is the right one, I just think they need to gather more data before letting this product be used in the wild unsupervised.

Current TACC/auto-steer doesn’t use deep learning except on the newest Model 3/Y vehicles with “TeslaVision”. All cars with radar use the radar and radar only to determine if they should stop for the following car.

Definitely use cameras as well to determine stopping. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been the issue with bridges or shadows causing phantom braking.

Re: U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

#190

Post by hnarn »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #27

I drive a lot across Europe: as in, really a lot, long trip across several countries, several times a year. I drive enough on the highways to know a few scary situations, like the truck driver in a big curve slightly deviating out of his lane and "pushing" me dangerously close to the median strip for example. To me driving requires paying constant attention to the road and being always ready to act swiftly: I just do…

> like the truck driver in a big curve slightly deviating out of his lane and "pushing" me dangerously close to the median strip for example

This is a situation that you simply shouldn’t put yourself in. There is no reason to ever drive right next to a large vehicle, on either side, except for very short periods when overtaking them on a straight road.

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