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Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

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Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#241

Post by ModernMech »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #208
ModernMech wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a roboticist who had learned from researchers involved in the 2007 DARPA urban challenge. The key takeaway from that event was that every single car that finished the race was equipped with the 3D velodyne LIDAR. It was that technology that enabled driverless cars to work as a concept. Why? Because it provided information that people had to infer, and that you couldn't easily get from camera. So absent the human…

I mean what does lidar do but tell you distance? A rangefinder optic from 1940 can also tell you distance with two little offset windows purely optically and accurately. Millions of rolls of films shot on this principle of optical distance finding. And yet, this is no good now, because IMO its musks idea and thats enough to poison it among the armchair engineers than any other reason. Telling to this point is how eve…

What poisons the idea among engineers is not that Musk came up with it (he didn't), but that he can't justify it using the language we speak, either by theory or by practice. Instead what we get from him is marketing, stunts, keynotes, sleights of hand, bravado, exaggerations, unfulfilled promises, premature rollouts of untested tech... the man is an anti-engineer, it's hard to trust him.

What made cars successful at the DUC was omnidirectional 3D distances to everything around you provided by the Velodyne LiDAR. So if we have a way to get that kind of data without a LiDAR, that would be fine.

Moreover, what a LIDAR gives you is an honest-to-god measurement. This whole idea of using deep learning to get range data from camera data is not measuring anything, it's making an inference. Which is why it's fooled by a looney tunes wall.

And like I said, we lack any inference engine that is better than the human brain. So betting your entire strategy on an inference engine that doesn't exist, bucking industry practice and the consensus of the engineering community, gets the following results:

  - The NHTSA’s self-driving crash data reveals that Tesla’s self-driving technology is, by far, the most dangerous for motorcyclists, with five fatal crashes that we know of.
  - This issue is unique to Tesla. Other self-driving manufacturers have logged zero motorcycle fatalities in the same time frame.
  - The crashes are overwhelmingly Teslas rear-ending motorcyclists.
If this problem is unique to Tesla, and Tesla is unique in relying solely on optical sensory input, then we can conclude relying solely on optical sensory input is bad. Nothing to do with the fact that Musk is the champion.

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#242

Post by BeetleB »

outer_web wrote: post #155
btrettel wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The base rate was discussed early in the article, but not by that name: > It’s not just that self-driving cars in general are dangerous for motorcycles, either: this problem is unique to Tesla. Not a single other automobile manufacturer or ADAS self-driving technology provider reported a single motorcycle fatality in the same time frame.

To add, even if the fatality numbers are small, accelerating into a person is a pretty outrageous failure mode.

My Subaru has done this many times, and with regular cars, not motorcycles.

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#243

Post by glitchc »

dboreham wrote: post #178
ravenstine wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, though he wouldn't be relevant if people didn't believe he is a genius.

Dubious about that. I think people thought he had a bunch of money, so did things for him in exchange for some of that money.

His father's profile: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Errol_Musk

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#244

Post by kelipso »

toddmorey wrote: post #142
xbmcuser wrote: post #22

The point I soured on Musk was when he ditched radar/lidar and tried to go with camera's alone. This made me realize he is not the genius he is made out to be but instead he is a fraud/charlatan and over the years his statements on different topics have only hardened that belief. Why the fuck would you want ai cars to be the same as humans you should want them to be many times better and radarr/lidar sonarr type tech…

This was purely an effort to improve margins on the cars that they tried to sell with other types of rationale. From the way I've seen him operate his companies, treat his employees, and now work with the government, he has a high tolerance for risk paired with a very low tolerance for perceived inefficiencies plus too little patience to fully understand the problem. He really embodies the ethos of "move fast and bre…

It's pretty funny because lidar used to be many thousands of dollars and now it's down to hundreds and they're still sticking to just regular cameras. Funny in the sense that Teslas are many times more dangerous than lidar enabled cars but anyway.

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#245

Post by toddmorey »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #223
throw0101d wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make." — Lord Farquaad, Shrek , https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126029/characters/nm0001475?it...

The irony is almost palpable, invoking this quote against a system that is driving 600 million miles a quarter without the 8 deaths a human would cause over the same distance.

The argument here isn't against self-driving. Flying is also 100x safer than driving, but there's still real value in continuing to use the best technology we have available to make flying even safer.

"Not a single other automobile manufacturer or ADAS self-driving technology provider reported a single motorcycle fatality in the same time frame."

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#246

Post by crote »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #208
ModernMech wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a roboticist who had learned from researchers involved in the 2007 DARPA urban challenge. The key takeaway from that event was that every single car that finished the race was equipped with the 3D velodyne LIDAR. It was that technology that enabled driverless cars to work as a concept. Why? Because it provided information that people had to infer, and that you couldn't easily get from camera. So absent the human…

I mean what does lidar do but tell you distance? A rangefinder optic from 1940 can also tell you distance with two little offset windows purely optically and accurately. Millions of rolls of films shot on this principle of optical distance finding. And yet, this is no good now, because IMO its musks idea and thats enough to poison it among the armchair engineers than any other reason. Telling to this point is how eve…

There is a huge difference between measuring the distance to a single target a few miles away, and measuring the distance to dozens of moving, accelerating, and overlapping objects in close proximity to each other and to the reference point.

Besides, rangefinding optics weren't exactly amazing in the 1940s either. It's why the introduction of radar made such a massive difference in naval warfare.

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#247

Post by bee_rider »

Retric wrote: post #146
jfengel wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I misread your first sentence, in that having multiple pilots is not necessarily a good thing, like multiple cooks. You have a main and a backup pilot, but either one must be 100% capable of doing it on their own. The backup is silently double checking, but their assignments are more about ensuring that the copilot doesn't just check out because they're human. If the copilot ever has to say "don't do that it's going…

Cars unlike aircraft don’t need to move forward to maintain safety. If the lidar normally has very good uptime but happens to break, you need to safely come to a complete stop and that’s basically it. Trusting vision systems for 30 seconds or even 30 minutes over the lifetime of a car is very different than trusting them for 30,000 hours. So for edge cases sure, add a “this is an emergency drive to a hospital without…

There are cases where cars do need to move.

* train tracks as mentioned by another comment

* getting out of the way of emergency vehicles or following instructions from emergency workers

I don’t think this detracts from the overall point—if the uptime is very good then the times when LiDAR doesn’t work and the car needs to move might practically never happen. Or the car might be able to move forward to a safe position in some limp-along mode.

WRT “this is an emergency drive to a hospital without LiDAR,” I think that would be pretty bad to include. What exactly qualifies as an emergency (this will be abused by some users)? And anyway, in most cases it is better to have an ambulance for an emergency. Finally, an emergency on my part doesn’t entitle me to endanger society. Rather, the types of behavior that the car can perform without all the sensors should be kept track of. If the car can limp along without LiDAR, then that’s something it can do (with the caveat that some roads are not safe to drive far under the speed limit on).

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#248

Post by senkora »

I see a lot of people saying that this isn't statistically significant. I think that that is probably true, but I also think that it is important to do the statistical test to make sure:

    tesla.mult = c(1/(5:2),1:5)
    data.frame(tesla.mult = tesla.mult, p.value = sapply(tesla.mult, (function(tesla.mult) { poisson.test(c(5, 0), c(tesla.mult, 1))$p.value })))

      tesla.mult      p.value
    1  0.2000000 0.0001286008
    2  0.2500000 0.0003200000
    3  0.3333333 0.0009765625
    4  0.5000000 0.0041152263
    5  1.0000000 0.0625000000
    6  2.0000000 0.1769547325
    7  3.0000000 0.3408203125
    8  4.0000000 0.5904000000
    9  5.0000000 1.0000000000
tesla.mult is how many times more total miles Teslas have driven with level-2 ADAS engaged compared to all other makers. We don't have data for what that number should be because automakers are not required to report it. I think that it is probably somewhere between 1/5 and 5. If you believe that the number is more than 1, then the result is not statistically significant.

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#249

Post by [deleted] »

daveguy wrote: post #234
smallmancontrov wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is almost palpable, invoking this quote against a system that is driving 600 million miles a quarter without the 8 deaths a human would cause over the same distance.

[citation needed] Tesla releases all self driving statistics including time since disengagement of self-driving before accident, right?

[deleted]

Re: Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other

#250

Post by breadwinner »

vitus wrote: post #200
energy123 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple independent sensor streams is like having multiple pilots fly a plane instead of just one pilot. The chance of a fatal error (false negative identification of an object near the car) decreases from p to p^n. The size of that decrease is not intuitive: if p=0.0001 it now becomes a much smaller number with the introduction of a second pilot or second independent sensor stream (0.0001^2). Now the errors are not…

I think that's an oversimplification, and helps mainly in the case where one sensor is totally offline. If you have two sensors, one says everything's fine but the other says you're about to crash, which one do you trust? What if the one that says you're about to crash is feeding you bad data? And what if the resulting course correction leads to a different failure? I'd hope that we've learned these lessons from the…

> If you have two sensors, one says everything's fine but the other says you're about to crash, which one do you trust?

Neither. You stop the car and tow it to the nearest repair facility. (Or have a human driver take over until the fault is repaired.)

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