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

Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

electrek.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 410 posts

Re: Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

#221

Post by mrtksn »

agildehaus wrote: post #30

A friend of mine who loves Tesla watched this video and said "many humans would have hit that". I feel we'll be hearing a lot of that excuse.

Obviously, in this particular case the humans wouldn't be hitting that. The people in the video have clearly seen the object, but they didn't want to react because that would have ruined their video.

Even if they did not understand what it is, in the real world when you see something on the road you slow down or do a maneuver to avoid it, no matter if it is a harmless peace of cloth or something dangerous like this. People are very good at telling if something is off, you can see it in the video.

Re: Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

#222

Post by ACCount37 »

Xylakant wrote: post #191
ACCount37 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the main advantage self-driving has over humans now. A self-driving car of today still underperforms the top of the line human driver - but it sure outperforms the "0.1% worst case": the dumbest most inebriated sleep deprived and distracted reckless driver that's responsible for the vast majority of severe road accidents. Statistics show it plain and clear: self-driving cars already get into less accidents tha…

The statistics on this are much less clear than Tesla would like us to believe. There's a lot of confounding factors, among them the fact that the autonomous driver can decide to hand over things to a human the moment things get hairy. The subsequent crash then gets credited to human error.

That's an often-repeated lie.

Tesla's crash reporting rules:

> To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed.

NHSTA's reporting rules are even more conservative:

> Level 2 ADAS: Entities named in the General Order must report a crash if Level 2 ADAS was in use at any time within 30 seconds of the crash and the crash involved a vulnerable road user being struck or resulted in a fatality, an air bag deployment, or any individual being transported to a hospital for medical treatment.

At highway speeds, "30 seconds" is just shy of an eternity.

Re: Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

#223

Post by JohnFen »

dmix wrote: post #163
tptacek wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans routinely drive from LA to NYC without wrecking their cars. In fact, that's the normal outcome.

I'd imagine the highway doesn't normally have a debris that's nearly the same color of the surface of a highway.

I encounter such things a few times a year. Usually a retread that has come off a truck tire.

Re: Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

#224

Post by rkomorn »

dmix wrote: post #166
rkomorn wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the point was the human was intentionally letting the car do its thing, though.

With their hands on the steering wheel and foot next to a brake and two people looking out the window.

Are you saying "they let the car drive on its own but were still paying attention"?

Not sure how to take this reply.

Re: Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

#226

Post by HankStallone »

saberdancer wrote: post #55
ForHackernews wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you watch the video, the human non-drivers in the car noticed the road debris and could have reacted, but seemed not to because they were waiting for the computer to respond first.

They were testing FSD so I understand why they would do it. It also looked like roadkill and didn't expect it to be a hard obstacle.

Heh, just yesterday I drove past some roadkill and wondered what a self-driving car would make of that. Then I started wondering how it would handle deer crossing the road 50 years ahead, or running alongside the vehicle as they sometimes do when they get spooked. Or how it would handle the way people drive down the center of gravel roads until they meet someone, and then move over.

At 56, I don't expect to see it on country roads in my lifetime, but maybe someday they'll get there.

Re: Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

#227

Post by jcranmer »

agildehaus wrote: post #30

A friend of mine who loves Tesla watched this video and said "many humans would have hit that". I feel we'll be hearing a lot of that excuse.

When the self-driving car killed a pedestrian several years ago, the initial sentiment on this site for the first few hours was essentially "those dastardly pedestrians, darting into traffic at the last second, how are you supposed to avoid them?" It took several hours for enough information to percolate through to make people realize that the pedestrian had been slowly and quite visibly crossing the road and the self-driving car (nor the safety driver) never did a thing to react to it.

Another thing to keep in mind is that video footage is much lower quality than what we can see with our human eyeballs. At no point in the video can I clearly identify what the debris is, but it's clearly evident that the humans in the car can, because they're clearly reacting to it seconds before it's even visible to us in the dash-cam-quality footage. I will freely accept that many drivers are in fact bad drivers, but a carcass (I think?) on a lane visible for >10 seconds away is something that anyone who can't avoid needs to have their license revoked.

Re: Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

#228

Post by skeeter2020 »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #126
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #117

One of my biggest criticisms of Elon is that he rarely takes accountability for his words and nobody ever holds him accountable by asking directly. This isn't a high bar to clear, but some people continuously excuse him as being "overly-eager" in his predictions. If that was the case, he could still provide reasonable updates when a predicted date is missed along with an explanation, even if it's just: "Hey, it turns…

In America, you fail the second you apologize or take accountability. Ignoring criticism and deflecting all the time gets you further, as it is part of the game. Unfortunately, this is just an accepted social science-y thing at this point. It is a very much cultural thing of the past couple of decades.

It's too bad, because "I'm sorry; this is my fault" is the biggest diffuser of anger and best way to appease mad customers. Try it sometime; the other party goes from ready to kill you to apologetic themselves (if you're genuine). Unfortunately it's seen as a sign of weakness by people like Elon and his cult of impersonators and an admission of liability by the litigious crowd. If you can be strong, confident and ready to admit it when you're wrong you'll not only be successful in confrontational situations but also not a giant dick.

Re: Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

#229

Post by richrichardsson »

kgwgk wrote: post #210
richrichardsson wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm unsure why having traffic tailgating even factors into it. If you have to hit the brakes to avoid a collision in front of you, it's not your responsibility to deal with traffic behind you that wasn't at a safe distance; that's all on them.

It’s not like you would expect any inconvenience from being rear-ended or anything so why would you care?

The point is "If you *have* to hit the brakes to avoid a collision in front of you". Obviously if you have a tailgating idiot behind and you can avoid the collision in front without forcing them to rear-end you, then you do that; but that's not always possible, and in that case the blame is then entirely on the person who hit you from the rear, and *not* on you for rear-ending someone.

Re: Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

#230

Post by magicalhippo »

general1465 wrote: post #50

Tangentially - If you as a European happen to drive on US highways, you will noticed that they are heavily littered with fallen cargo, aluminum ladders, huge amount of shredded tires and occasionally a trailer without a towing car... It has been so bizarre for me to observe this. Nobody is cleaning that?

I'm from Norway, and visited a buddy in Florida back in the early 2000s. It was my first time to the US.

I recall I was completely flabbergasted by all the cars just ditched along the highway. There were lots of them, just off the road into the grass on the side or whatever.

I asked my buddy about it and he said it was usually tires, as it was cheaper to buy another car than get new tires... Well that didn't help my blown mind one bit.

Mind you, on the way to his house I passed a Kia dealer which literally had a huge "buy one car - get one free" sign outside...

Post reply on HN