Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by namelost » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:12 AM UTC

jaggederest wrote: post #208

namelost wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A high rate of road deaths isn't a fait accompli. Musk would have us believe that technology is the only answer. The UK has the 2nd-lowest rate of road deaths in the world (after Sweden). The roads in the UK are not intrinsically safe, they are very narrow both in urban and rural areas which means there are more hazards and less time to avoid them. However, the UK has strict driver education programme. It is not easy…

> The roads in the UK are not intrinsically safe, they are very narrow both in urban and rural areas which means there are more hazards and less time to avoid them. Actually, paradoxically that means they are actually safer. People drive slower on narrower roads, which means that accidents are within the safe energy envelope that modern cars can absorb. Very, very few people will ever die as a passenger or driver in…

You say that but people will happily drive at 50+ down a narrow country road. I think the "narrow = slower" only works for a limited period of time before people get normalised to it.

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

#212

Post by njarboe » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:14 AM UTC

oldgradstudent wrote: post #112

njarboe wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it is not. But might be someday. Will that be good enough? My dad would spend 100k on a car that was 10 times less safe, if it let him keep using a car. I'm sure others would as well.

Your dad would be happy to get a car that was 10X less safe, but the rest of us on the road will be less so. These are public roads, driving a dangerous cars put other people at risk.

What fraction of current drivers are 10x less safe? Probably all 16-20 year olds.

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

#213

Post by Svip » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:15 AM UTC

namelost wrote: post #201

sho_hn wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

A high rate of road deaths isn't a fait accompli. Musk would have us believe that technology is the only answer. The UK has the 2nd-lowest rate of road deaths in the world (after Sweden). The roads in the UK are not intrinsically safe, they are very narrow both in urban and rural areas which means there are more hazards and less time to avoid them. However, the UK has strict driver education programme. It is not easy…

Just a note. Switzerland ranks better than the UK. By inhabitants: Switzerland (2.6), Sweden (2.8) and UK (2.9). By motor vehicles: Switzerland (3.6), Finland (4.4), Sweden (4.7) and UK (5.1). By number of kilometres driven: Sweden (3.5), Switzerland (3.6) and UK (3.6).

I'd also note that most European countries are hot on the heels of the UK, Sweden and Switzerland by the above measures. By comparison, the US numbers are 10.6, 12.9 and 7.1, respectively. Most European countries are well below those numbers.

Particularly in Western European and Nordic countries, the driving tests are very strict. Even for all the stereotypes, France's numbers of 5.1, 7.6 and 5.8 are quite good, and they are moving in the right direction.

Sources:

* http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/road_safety_st...

* https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/transport/road-safety-annual-r...

Notes:

I use death rate, not incidents/accidents rate.

I ignored "smaller" countries for the above listing, such as San Marino and Kiribati.

All numbers are from 2015, and they are also presented in the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

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

#214

Post by chronid » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:16 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #17

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…

> 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.

Different environment (and stakes), but I observed the same thing happening a couple of times during IT incident response. The automation crashed/failed/got into a situation it could not automatically fix, and the occurrence was rare enough that people actually panicked and it took them quite a while to fix what in the end was a simple issue. They just didn't have the "manual skill" (in one case, the tools to actually go and solve the issue without manually manipulating databases) anymore.

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

#215

Post by ZoFreX » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:16 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #17

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…

If people are using it, not paying attention, with the expectation that it will beep to tell you to take over that's a big problem. In situations like this divider issue it won't beep, it thinks everything is fine right up until it rams you into a stationary object. I think people may not be fully aware of all the potential failure modes of this tech?

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

#216

Post by njarboe » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:16 AM UTC

bsder wrote: post #126

njarboe wrote: 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…

> 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 fatalities could be avoided. Your opinion will be irrelevant--the insurance companies get the final say. When that safety point arrives, your insurance rates will change to make manual driving unaffor…

My hope is that the testing to obtain a driver's license becomes much harder to get and easy to lose. Like a airplane pilots license.

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

#217

Post by maccard » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:17 AM UTC

namelost wrote: post #201

sho_hn wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

A high rate of road deaths isn't a fait accompli. Musk would have us believe that technology is the only answer. The UK has the 2nd-lowest rate of road deaths in the world (after Sweden). The roads in the UK are not intrinsically safe, they are very narrow both in urban and rural areas which means there are more hazards and less time to avoid them. However, the UK has strict driver education programme. It is not easy…

> It is not easy to pass the driving test, with some people failing multiple times. It means that people only get a license when they are ready for it.

And that's the way it should be. The driving test may not be easy, but it's not any more difficult than driving is. People should be held to a high standard when controlling high speed hunks of metal.

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

#218

Post by njarboe » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:17 AM UTC

m_mueller wrote: post #145

njarboe wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sort of assuming Tesla is doing this already.

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

#219

Post by kalal » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:21 AM UTC

antirez wrote: post #200

What is happening was clear to many since the start: Tesla incarnates the behavior of his founder, exaggerating the technology that is really available right now, and selling it as a product without the premise for it to be safe. A product that kinda drives your car but sometimes fails, and requires you to pay attention, is simply a crash that we are waiting to happen. And don't get trapped by the "data driven" analy…

4. This statistics must be conditioned. Not all drivers are the same. Some are careful, some are not. So in fact, the careful drivers will make their life miserable by using autopilot.

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

#220

Post by m_mueller » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 9:21 AM UTC

jk563 wrote: post #202

m_mueller wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

What about if it could pass a driving test?

Since it would be one software being used many times over, I'd be fine if it could pass a large number of driving test with very low failure rate, considering driving tests are quite random in how they are applied. The question is however which driving test. My experience in Switzerland was that the practical driving test was quite hard to pass, I had to train a lot to satisfy them completely and they route you for one hour quite randomly around a European medieval town and its outskirts, i.e. a place that's quite hard to navigate correctly as it's not built for cars.