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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

#351

Post by scarface_74 »

luckylion wrote: post #333
scarface_74 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who die in workplace accidents are only affecting them. It’s completely different if an autonomous vehicle injured someone else. Also dangerous workplaces are carefully controlled access environments where only the people that work there are in danger. Imagine if airplane fatalities happen even 1% as often as car fatalities? Right now the ratio is around 770:1 per passenger mile.

I assume that airplanes would have to offer much more value for that to be accepted, but they are mostly a luxury while cars are a necessity - life as we know it in much of the Western world would come to a screeching halt without cars, but it continues mostly unchanged without planes. I don't think I agree that workplace accidents are that different. It's not primarily the workers who die who benefit from those mach…

> I don't think I agree that workplace accidents are that different. It's not primarily the workers who die who benefit from those machines that kill them - I'd say the workers _are_ someone else.

I’m not saying only the workers benefit. I’m saying there is no outrage if some coal miners die in West Virginia and definitely there is no outrage about the working conditions of immigrant farmers, factory workers at Amazon warehouses, and definitely not the supply chains overseas.

But if little Becky got killed by an autonomous car, you would have all sorts of hearings.

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

#352

Post by mturmon »

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…

It does not seem like you have much experience with either LiDAR or stereo vision. These systems have well known performance characteristics and advantages. LiDAR has its limitations (in terms of point density and scan rate, and cost), but its range estimate accuracy just blows stereo vision away for automotive settings.

The error on range estimates from stereo “disparity” goes up as range squared for fundamental-physics reasons. Accurate calculation of disparity relies on well calibrated optics (clean, physically rigid) and it’s easy to disrupt that.

Stereo is also target-sensitive. Stereo ranging is enhanced by certain target features, like large, smooth surfaces with texture (say, stucco walls, or car grilles). It is made more difficult by smaller target surfaces with weird curvature.

I’m sure that stereo that did well on auto-sized surfaces would do much worse for pedestrian or motorcycle (size and shape) surfaces.

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

#353

Post by ReptileMan »

dragonwriter wrote: post #196
ReptileMan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have more than 100 years of proof that visual detection works quite well. The problem is that we don't have certification process before a tech is deployed on the streets - your AV must pass this and this tests before you are allowed to use it. We don't care how you got there lidar, gps/astrology, camera/ai are all ok as long as you pass

> We have more than 100 years of proof that visual detection works quite well. No, we don't. We have evidence that visual detection (well, the whole human set of senses, but for driving most of the reliance is on visual detection), combined with human level intelligence , is sufficient for the human-level driving which is the absolute minimum bar for fully automated driving. Which is very different than “visual detec…

Why are you disagreeing with me while proving my point?

The signal we get is enough. It is the processing that is still lacking. And that is why there should be benchmarks to be passed. Cameras and microphones do provide enough information for successful driving.

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

#354

Post by josephcsible »

breadwinner wrote: post #264
Workaccount2 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because the sensor suite for lidar is expensive and HD cameras are basically a commodity at this point. So if your goal is to pump out $20k self driving cars, then you need cameras to be good enough. So the logic becomes "If humans can do it, so can cameras, otherwise we have no product, no promise."

Cameras have poor dynamic range and can be easily blinded by bright surfaces. While it is true that humans do fine with only eyes, our eyes are significantly better than cameras. More importantly, expectations are higher when an automated system is driving the car. It is not sufficient if, in aggregate, self-driving cars have fewer accidents. If you lose a loved one in an accident where the accident could have been e…

How many strangers' lives is a loved one's life worth? If your answer is anything other than "1", how does that square with other people having their own loved ones, and your loved ones being strangers to them?

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

#355

Post by dharmab »

snozolli wrote: post #152
dharmab wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're different. Filtering is between stopped cars, splitting is in moving traffic.

This is completely arbitrary Internet lore. Unless you have local laws that define the terms, they don't actually mean anything. Also, if you're "filtering", then you will , inevitably, find yourself "lane splitting" when the light turns green before you reach the front.

I do in fact have a local law defining the terms: https://ridetolive.utah.gov/lane-filtering/

And I rarely find myself splitting when the light changes; I simply dip back into the lane when the light changes before traffic starts moving.

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

#356

Post by bchris4 »

Whether you like Tesla or not: this blog post is a perfect example of how clickbait headlines twist things around. Nobody reads anymore - if you made it down to the nitty gritty of each actual example, it’s painfully obvious that many have almost nothing to do with the self driving software at all, other than how humans can interact with it to screw it all up. There’s:

- A drunk driver doing 100 in a 45 (by pressing down on the pedal) through a yellow light

- A driver who “didn’t see the motorcyclist” because he was looking at his PHONE, but who had the go pedal pressed down at 95-100% for as many as 10 seconds after hitting him, to the point where witnesses say the front wheels were spinning while up in the air

- Others with no detail- not the authors fault but from the ones we have, clearly there are often circumstances which would require more analysis before coming to this conclusion

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

#357

Post by moralestapia »

breadwinner wrote: post #299
moralestapia wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. That was Karpathy's decision [1] and, yes, I also have that perception of him. I know this is not going to be well received because he's one of HN's pet prodigies but, objectively, it was him. 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempl…

From the article: While Elon Musk is best known for making statements on this, Karpathy was his go-to guy on backing up that reasoning. I read that as Musk wanted this done and asked Karpathy to find a way.

https://x.com/bilawalsidhu/status/1900941701587370296

Seems to me that the guy is pretty convinced, but sure your mind belongs to you and you can make it whatever you want, maybe Musk was behind with a gun, who knows.

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

#358

Post by breadwinner »

josephcsible wrote: post #354
breadwinner wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cameras have poor dynamic range and can be easily blinded by bright surfaces. While it is true that humans do fine with only eyes, our eyes are significantly better than cameras. More importantly, expectations are higher when an automated system is driving the car. It is not sufficient if, in aggregate, self-driving cars have fewer accidents. If you lose a loved one in an accident where the accident could have been e…

How many strangers' lives is a loved one's life worth? If your answer is anything other than "1", how does that square with other people having their own loved ones, and your loved ones being strangers to them?

Don't understand your point. Everyone's life is important, which is why I said: the expectation is that in each individual injury accident a human clearly could not have handled the situation any better. It is insufficient for self-driving cars to be as safe as, or even slightly better than human drivers. Which is why, better-than-human sensors are needed.

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

#359

Post by gruez »

NoTeslaThrow wrote: post #350
gruez wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Human vision isn't good enough, though. Maybe if your standard is "scheduled commercial passenger flights" level of safety. >Otherwise why not just drive the car yourself? There's plenty of reasons why humans can be more dangerous outside of vision quality. For instance, being distracted, poor reaction times, or not being able to monitor all angles simultaneously.

> For instance, being distracted, poor reaction times, or not being able to monitor all angles simultaneously. As a pitch for self driving, it's going to be a long time before I trust a computer to do the above better than I do. At the very least adding sensors I don't have access to will give me assurance the car won't drive into a wall with a road painted on it. I don't know how on earth you'd market self-driving a…

>At the very least adding sensors I don't have access to will give me assurance the car won't drive into a wall with a road painted on it.

This is as relevant as self driving cars not being able to detect anti-tank mines. If you want to intentionally cause harm, there are far easier ways than erecting a wall in the middle of a roadway and then painting a mural on it. If you're worried about it accidentally occurring, the fact that there's no incidents suggests it's at least unlikely enough to not worry about.

>Aggregate statistics about safety aren't going to make me feel emotionally stable when I am familiar with how jerky and skittish the driving is under visually confusing driving conditions.

Sounds like this is less about the tech used (ie. cameras vs lidar) and how "smooth" the car appears to behave.

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

#360

Post by polygamous_bat »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #153
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.

That gives you absolute rate, but not relative rate. There are not many other cars out there (in comparison), with a self-driving mode. There are so many Teslas in the World out there driving around, that I think you'd have to considerably multiply all the others combined to get close to that number. As such, while 5 > 0, and that's a problem, what we don't know (and perhaps can't know), is how that adjusts for popul…

> As such, while 5 > 0, and that's a problem, what we don't know (and perhaps can't know), is how that adjusts for population size.

This puts the burden on companies which may hesitate to put their “self driving” methods out there because it has trouble with detecting motorcyclists. There is a solid possibility that self driving isn’t being rolled out by others because they have higher regard for human life than Tesla and its exec.

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