Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser • Hacker News Board

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#271

Post by dbasedweeb » Wed, May 30, 2018, 3:56 AM UTC

ajross wrote: post #270

abalone wrote: post #102

I keep wondering what the customer benefit of Level 2 autopilot is if not to lower your attention and relax your mind. Tesla's "out" is that drivers are supposed to retain full attention and oversight of the autopilot system -- but then if you strictly follow this rule, what is the benefit of autopilot? I can see the benefit to Tesla and future Tesla customers of essentially crowdsourced fleet learning. But what is t…

> But what is the benefit right now if you strictly follow the rule of remaining alert enough to intervene at a second's notice? You have an extra failsafe for those moments where you fail to remain alert. People keep treating these incidents in isolation and failing to account for the fact that human drivers make exactly this kind of fuckup every hour of every day, and lives are lost. Every day. You get that right?…

Tesla is shipping systems in the absolute infancy of this technology that are already statistically indistinguishable from human drivers as far as safety goes.

That’s a hell of a claim, I’d love to see some serious citations on it.

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#272

Post by panic » Wed, May 30, 2018, 3:56 AM UTC

admyral wrote: post #215

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame Elon Musk. I'm serious. He's been promising "self-driving" for years, except the damn technology isn't ready/safe enough for what people are clearly using this from. The manufacturer puts a warning label, but the usage model/UI is clearly flawed. His engineers know this, which is why Tesla's self-driving group has had such a high turnover rate over the last few years. Musk keeps overriding them.

No offense but this is exactly the attitude that inhibits progress and led the auto industry to languish in mediocrity for years. If you wait until the technology would prevent all accidents, you'd be waiting forever.

I think you're setting up a dichotomy here that doesn't exist. It's not a choice between waiting forever or disregarding safety. Look at how Waymo is approaching the problem, for example.

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#273

Post by olliej » Wed, May 30, 2018, 3:56 AM UTC

ajross wrote: post #259

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame Elon Musk. I'm serious. He's been promising "self-driving" for years, except the damn technology isn't ready/safe enough for what people are clearly using this from. The manufacturer puts a warning label, but the usage model/UI is clearly flawed. His engineers know this, which is why Tesla's self-driving group has had such a high turnover rate over the last few years. Musk keeps overriding them.

> except the damn technology isn't ready/safe enough for what people are clearly using this from Outrageously false. These incidents are so rare that they have whole news stories written about every single one. How many crashes were there in Laguna Beach yesterday? Tesla accident rates in aggregate are quite good. Under autopilot the data is noisy but still underneath the level of an average car (not as low as luxury…

The problem is that the argument being presented: "self driving is safer" is defeated by very obvious failures (driving into pillars, police cars, and people) that are /exactly/ the kinds of things that a computer should be able to handle. Human caused accidents in these situations are almost invariably due to inattentiveness that should not apply to any automated system.

So we get to the problem of "if it can't do handle the specific obvious case where it should be absolutely superior" (I would argue an automated system should not have ever been able to make either the police cruiser or the 280 crash in any circumstances. Those were both in perfect conditions - clear weather, etc, etc), how can we trust it to handle any of the complex situations that a self driving car necessarily must handle?

The Tesla system solves this by simply saying "the driver is still driving, we're merely assisting", but that assistance leads to inattentiveness - that's human nature, you have to design around it - which should be fine, if the systems were able to handle that, but that clearly are not.

I would argue that given the configuration of the Tesla system they are less safe, not necessarily due to net accidents, but rather because of the failure modes of the accidents. Bumper to bumper accidents on a freeway happen all the time, even driving perfectly you can end up in them because not everyone else is driving perfectly. The problem with things like the Tesla system is that it's generally fine, except in those cases where it drives at speed into objects because it gets confused.

If your vision or mental state leaves you unable to safely account for large obstructions you aren't allowed to drive. Because it isn't safe.

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#274

Post by hndamien » Wed, May 30, 2018, 3:57 AM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #240

annerajb wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the purchase section it clearly breaks the capability out including which ones are active/ enabled. In addition on the car manual and UI at enabling also spells it out. It says keep your hands on the wheel and paying attention to pick over immediately.

People don't read manuals. People don't read instructions in the UI. That is well-established reality. People glance at a web page or ad and see the words "full self-driving" and that's what sets their expectations.

They don't apparently read pop-ups prior to driving, ends of sentences ("full self driving capable hardware"), definitions of words, hacker news comments, listen to audible warnings to keep hands on the steering wheel. At what point does a person become responsible for their own actions?

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#275

Post by plttn » Wed, May 30, 2018, 4:00 AM UTC

anonymfus wrote: post #211

gehwartzen wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the "paying attention" part of driving is actually one of the most mentally taxing for the driver and it seems the pay attention 100% of the time is basically the same as saying 5% of the time an event might occurs that requires your immediate action. The problem being that if you have to jump into action to avoid something catastrophic 'sometimes' you basically have to be paying full attention al…

Japanese train drivers are famous for pointing at things to always keep attention. May be similar system can be used for cars: for example car could narrate objects it sees and ask driver to point at them with hand, then check with depth sensor and gesture recognition that user pointed correctly, and then slow down and stop if user pointed wrong.

But that has the problem of "computer recognizes 'car', asks fleshy meat-bag to point at 'car', sees meat-bag point at 'car'".

It doesn't learn anything about the environment from that, so to me it doesn't change anything.

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#276

Post by Animats » Wed, May 30, 2018, 4:00 AM UTC

Has Tesla blamed the driver yet? They might get away with that here. The road was not divided and unsuitable for their lane-keeping system. The pavement markings are unusual.[1]

Of course, as usual, their obstacle detection failed to detect a stationary obstacle that didn't look like the rear end of a car in the same lane. We need a minimum standard for a vehicle which takes automated control of steering and braking. It must reliably stop for obstacles.

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/BjqTZoD5Yws

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#277

Post by hndamien » Wed, May 30, 2018, 4:02 AM UTC

Sylos wrote: post #246

hndamien wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we should just start calling Monero Bitcoin because many people are consistently wrong?

No, we shouldn't. But a company that advertises software against JavaScript-Bitcoin-miners knows exactly that people will think their software helps against JavaScript-Monero-miners. If it's a reasonable company, they'll try to deal with this public misunderstanding and point out that their software can't help with Monero-miners. If it's an asshole company, they'll cash in on people mistakenly buying their software.…

There are no javascript Bitcoin miners, people just think they exist. I mean technically it is possible, but it would be very pointless.

People just lump all crypto together because of ignorance. As is the case here. Autopilot is not fully self-driving.

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#278

Post by perl4ever » Wed, May 30, 2018, 4:02 AM UTC

mrb wrote: post #261

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame Elon Musk. I'm serious. He's been promising "self-driving" for years, except the damn technology isn't ready/safe enough for what people are clearly using this from. The manufacturer puts a warning label, but the usage model/UI is clearly flawed. His engineers know this, which is why Tesla's self-driving group has had such a high turnover rate over the last few years. Musk keeps overriding them.

« the damn technology isn't ready/safe enough » What data are you basing this statement on? Or is this just your vague gut feeling based on reading about a few accidents in the news? I thought statistical data showed otherwise, that the technology was safe enough (ie. better than humans). Edit: removed "debunked stats".

Reading that blog entry makes me more distrustful of Tesla than I was, because I don't think it's appropriate to compare Autopilot miles to generic human driver miles. Autopilot is not suitable for all types of driving. The most readily accessible statistics that would be more comparable would be fatalities on interstates.

US interstate deaths are about 1 per 183 million miles, so while Autopilot may be safer, it's not as clear depending on the uncertainty of the 320 million mile figure. Also, German drivers on the autobahn have roughly half the fatality rate, which is better than the claim for Autopilot. All in all, I think an honest assessment would be that it's probably as good as an average driver in good conditions who isn't drunk. But rhetoric about saving 900K lives raises my hackles - I do not want to trust the source of this sort of PR with my life.

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#279

Post by glandium » Wed, May 30, 2018, 4:02 AM UTC

beamatronic wrote: post #176

jfim wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing, how do you make an UI that unambiguously conveys that the car hasn't seen an object in front of it, so that the driver can react to it? Maybe with AR the car could highlight the objects detected so that the driver can brake if the car doesn't see an object it knows about, but a head mounted display seems pretty clunky.

Well, how does an airplane do it. A loud robot voice that goes “PULL... UP...”

If a loud robot voice goes "PULL UP", airplane pilots still have much more than a couple seconds to do something about it.

Re: Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser

#280

Post by pmontra » Wed, May 30, 2018, 4:03 AM UTC

Los Angeles Times blocked Europe because of GDPR. Here's a link we can read from there https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-autopilot/tesla-hit...