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

#251

Post by 21 » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 10:15 AM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #139

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…

Nuclear power plants, plane crashes, terrorism, school shootings, even some rare diseases (the mad cow disease led to the slaughter of millions of cattle, having killed in the UK less than 200 people cumulatively, whereas the flu can easily kill 10,000 people in a single year just in the UK). I don’t think it has anything to do with technology and automation. People are just very bad at reasoning with probabilities.…

Funny, Nassim Taleb, a worldwide (if controversial) risk probability expert, would say that you are the one which is being very bad at reasoning with probabilities, because you are putting Ebola and terrorism in the same class of risk as falling off a ladder:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dKiLclupUM

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

#252

Post by agumonkey » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 10:18 AM UTC

icc97 wrote: post #101

agumonkey wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe force users back in either speeds above 30, crowded places, complex topologies.

According to these videos, auto-pilot should be turning itself off if it detects bright sunlight obscuring it's vision.

That's good but this is based on device limitation only, not user attention and broad probability.

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

#253

Post by teppix » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 10:18 AM UTC

melling wrote: post #249

smoyer wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4. There is another completely unknown variable - how many times would the autopilot have crashed if the human hadn't taken over. So Tesla's statistics are actually stating how safe the autopilot and human are when combined, not how safe the autopilot is by itself.

I thought the autopilot was always supposed to be combined with the human. It’s not a self-driving car. It’s really an advanced cruise control.

The statistics also includes all the cases where drivers are not paying attention as they should, and it's still safer than the average car (at least according to Tesla).

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

#254

Post by antirez » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 10:19 AM UTC

melling wrote: post #249

smoyer wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4. There is another completely unknown variable - how many times would the autopilot have crashed if the human hadn't taken over. So Tesla's statistics are actually stating how safe the autopilot and human are when combined, not how safe the autopilot is by itself.

I thought the autopilot was always supposed to be combined with the human. It’s not a self-driving car. It’s really an advanced cruise control.

That's true but is against any good sense: cars don't allow you to play a video while driving, and allow you to have the false sense of security that somebody else is driving while instead you have to pay constant attention?

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

#255

Post by buvanshak » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 10:20 AM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #228

edelans wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> be part of a statistics that you can control well, even if you are in control with your hands on the wheel, you can still get heart (and even die) in a car accident where you have no responsibility at all. Sure you can control your car, but you cannot control others'... (this is even more obvious from a cyclist point of view)

Also people vastly overestimate their driving competence.

That is certainly not the norm. People does not "vastly" overestimate their driving competence..

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

#256

Post by buvanshak » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 10:23 AM UTC

edelans wrote: post #190

buvanshak wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but autopilot still lowers the death rate on average. I think the question of using self driving vehicles comes down to this. Do you want to be part of a statistics that you can control, or do you want to be part of one that you cannot? When we go in trains or planes, we are already being part of statistics that we cannot control. But those things also are extremely reliable. So there seems to be a threshold, where…

> be part of a statistics that you can control well, even if you are in control with your hands on the wheel, you can still get heart (and even die) in a car accident where you have no responsibility at all. Sure you can control your car, but you cannot control others'... (this is even more obvious from a cyclist point of view)

I am Sorry. Not having control of a lot of stuff that happen in the world does not mean that you don't have some influence on if you will be in an accident or not, if you are driving the car yourself?

With half baked self driving tech, you have absolutely no control..

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

#257

Post by quotemstr » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 10:25 AM UTC

buvanshak wrote: post #255

XorNot wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also people vastly overestimate their driving competence.

That is certainly not the norm. People does not "vastly" overestimate their driving competence..

Discussions of driving among lay people are generally useless and interminable, due largely to the supercharged Dunning-Kruger effect that driving for whatever reason produces. No matter where you are or who's talking, the speaker is always a good, careful driver, other drivers are reckless morons, and the city in which they all live has the worst drivers in the country.

Everyone everywhere says the same thing. It's information-free discourse.

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

#258

Post by qaq » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 10:25 AM UTC

cam_l wrote: post #232

adanto6840 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you think of any reasons or situations where that logic fails? I can think of tons. The very challenging, and somewhat unusual given the life/death stakes, aspect of this domain in general is that general 'easy' logic works for 99% of the scenarios. But in the remaining 1% -- and I mean every single possible last scenario, whether probable or not -- the "what to do" is so much more difficult. Enough time to do it…

slowing down should be the first thing a car does in these scenarios. the confidence factor matters less as speed approaches zero. seriously, i slow down when i am unsure of the conditions, i surely have never evaluated every last scenario, and i have never run into a concrete barrier.

OK so you have a speeding loaded truck behind you that would not be able to break for whatever reason still want to slow down?

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

#259

Post by smoyer » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 10:27 AM UTC

melling wrote: post #249

smoyer wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4. There is another completely unknown variable - how many times would the autopilot have crashed if the human hadn't taken over. So Tesla's statistics are actually stating how safe the autopilot and human are when combined, not how safe the autopilot is by itself.

I thought the autopilot was always supposed to be combined with the human. It’s not a self-driving car. It’s really an advanced cruise control.

That's what Tesla says but that's not how people are using it - and as people grow more comfortable with the autopilot, the less vigilant they'll become. I have this picture in my head where people are trying to recoup their commute time as though they're using public transport. I suspect we'll get there some day but today is not that day.

While the Tesla spokespeople are good at saying it's driver assist, their marketing people haven't heard - https://www.tesla.com/autopilot/. That page states "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." but as I noted above, we don't know how much of that safety should be attributed to the human. Tesla apparently knows when the driver's hands are on the steering wheel and I presume they can also tell when the car brakes, so they may have the data to separate those statistics. At a minimum, their engineers should be looking at every case where the autopilot is engaged but the human intervenes. They should probably also slam on the brakes (okay ... more gently) if the driver is alerted to take over but doesn't.

As an aside, just the name "Autopilot" implies autonomy.

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

#260

Post by mozumder » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 10:28 AM UTC

teppix wrote: post #253

melling wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the autopilot was always supposed to be combined with the human. It’s not a self-driving car. It’s really an advanced cruise control.

The statistics also includes all the cases where drivers are not paying attention as they should, and it's still safer than the average car (at least according to Tesla).

> it's still safer than the average car (at least according to Tesla).

This is Tesla's big lie.

In all their marketing, Tesla is comparing crash rates of their passenger cars to ALL vehicles, including trucks and motorcycles, which have higher fatality rates. Motorcycles are about 10x-50x more dangerous than cars.

Not only that, they aren't controlling for variances in driver demographics - younger and old people have higher accident rates than middle-aged Tesla drivers - as well as environmental factors - rural roads have higher fatalities than highways. Never-mind the obvious "accidents in cars with Autopilot" vs "accidents in cars with Autopilot on".

If you do a proper comparison, Tesla's Autopilot is probably 100x more fatal than other cars. It's a god-dammed death trap.

And remember, there are several extremely normal cars with ZERO fatalities: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/record-9-models-have-...

This is not a problem that will be solved without fundamental infrastructure changes in the roads themselves. Anyone that believes in self-driving cars should never be employed, since they don't know what they're talking about.