391–400 of 447 posts
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It is only dangerous, if it is worse than the average driver.
No, it is still killing people, but average people are cuppable. Big difference.
In my mind — the standard response to such accidents should be to setup an endowment dedicated to the study of techniques promoting the enhancement of autonomous safety, named after the victim, in the geographical region of the accident. Build a damn research facility near the accident site — spread the valuable high tech knowledge across generations and demographics — along with the understanding that the ultimate mission being pursued is the safest autonomous systems possible.
This kind of response would go over really well I think and have a lot of benefits beyond just PR. There are very real possibilities that accident rates will not be uniform across driving regions due to the inability of models to optimize for the uneven distribution of risk sources across all driving scenarios. This gets _really evil_ if profit motive is allowed to be be the only mechanism driving the development of vehicle safety models. I cringe for a future where car accidents are biased to occur more often in poor or ethnic neighborhoods ...
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> It's widely known that RADAR systems are not able to detect stationary objects What the fuck? That's not at all how radar works. It has no such limitation.
My understanding is that RADAR systems can detect stationary objects just fine: What's going on is that in-car radar systems can't differentiate between, say, a metal sign on a gantry or at the side of the road and a parked car on the road, because their spatial resolution is poor to non-existent. Hence in-car RADAR systems (often) ignore radar returns that are non-moving relative to the road surface. Otherwise the c…
Same if you are about to enter a right-hand sweeper, pedestrians standing on the sidewalk in front of you would look as if they are directly in your path.
Musk mentioned this in one of his blog posts. Tesla is attempting to build a database of obstacles like this and geotag them, so that the car can filter them out.
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And besides, a car w/out an autopilot is probably easier to crash into a wall.
But no headlines and no expensive crash investigation. Say you’re in the car business and you don’t like Tesla and say you want to find people who are suicidal or maybe have some kind of debt and you can help them as long as they help you. Their family will be taken care of as long as they crash their Tesla into a concrete divider. I’m definitely not saying that’s what happened here but possible to imagine this scena…
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Note: Tesla is comparing the fatality rate of autopilot-equipped cars with the average accident rate. They are NOT only counting miles where autopilot is used, they are counting all miles driven by their cars. It could be that Tesla drivers are inherently safer than the general population, or that the cars themselves are much safer. What they are not doing (at least with the data) is making a statistical claim about…
That's a very good point. But it raises a new question, why didn't Tesla compare the safety record of Teslas with Autopilot against Teslas without Autopilot.
What I do know is that Tesla have previously published a comparison of the safety of their cars before and after the autopilot feature was made available, and there is a statistically significant improvement of nearly 60%. This study should factor out most of those caveats, since it’s the same cars, same drivers and same roads before and after the feature release. http://bgr.com/2017/01/19/tesla-autopilot-crash-safety-stati...
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And no, you can't get out of culpability by claiming statistical superiority. Quite. Tesla is deliberately comparing their modern vehicle design & wealthy driver base (statistically one of the safest cohorts) with the entirety of the U.S. driving population. This is bad statistics: We expect Tesla vehicles to have far fewer accidents than the mean US vehicle per mile, because Tesla's are expensive modern vehicles wit…
> Quite. Tesla is deliberately comparing their modern vehicle design & wealthy driver base (statistically one of the safest cohorts) with the entirety of the U.S. driving population. This is bad statistics: We expect Tesla vehicles to have far fewer accidents than the mean US vehicle per mile, because Tesla's are expensive modern vehicles with (relatively) wealthy drivers who can afford to keep them maintained & will…
One important nit: it isn't self driving. It's sometimes self driving.
About cohorts: how about this: young (thus inexperienced and more careless) drivers generally can't afford Teslas. So yes, wealth is an indicator for how accident prone someone might be.
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I think at least 50% of the blame should be placed on the maintainer of the road. The crash attenuator was 'used up' from a previous accident and might have prevented death if it was in working condition. I see this all the time where I live. Crashed attenuators or disfigured guard rails go months and months without repair.
If we are moving towards a future with self driving cars there needs standardization of road markers so that cars can recognize what's going on. This crash is looking to be the autopilots due to the strange lane markings. Have you ever driven down a road the lines grinded away and replace by new ones? Sometimes you can still see both sets, it can be pretty confusing for a human.
Any system that works by not interpreting the world outside is bound to encounter nasty surprises.
To me there is a stunning lack of compassion and decency in the response to these incidents by both Tesla and Uber. Uber made sure to point out that the victim of their incident was homeless. Tesla is pointing out how the driver received unrelated cues earlier in the journey. None of this information is relevant. They’re trying to bamboozle the reader in an effort to improve their images at the expense of victims who…
I agree with the lack of compassion bit -- I think the messaging could have been far more empathetic. However... > Uber made sure to point out that the victim of their incident was homeless. Tesla is pointing out how the driver received unrelated cues earlier in the journey. None of this information is relevant. I don't understand how you can equate those first two lines. Uber's observation is clearly irrelevant, but…
I really hate the whole Tesla angle of "technically we are not lying but we know people are going to mis-remember and misrepresent what we are writing". Take for instance: > The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive... What this means is that during this incident there were No visual or audible clues that a crash was about to happen What they are saying is that while…
But Tesla is shoveling in the bullshit pretty early on. Besides the fuzzy and deliberately vague stats (why is the mileage attributed to Tesla's "equipped with Autopilot hardware"?), this graf is just despicable:
> Tesla Autopilot does not prevent all accidents – such a standard would be impossible – but it makes them much less likely to occur. It unequivocally makes the world safer for the vehicle occupants, pedestrians and cyclists.
"unequivocally" has an actual meaning: leaving no doubt. And yet it's used following the paragraph that pretends Tesla's and all U.S. vehicles are directly comparable. I know it sounds silly to focus on that word but someone in Tesla PR thought it needed to be used with the pile of crap numbers. Such blatant and pointless deception -- "significantly" would work just as well for that inane sentence -- feels like a strong a signal to doubt the rest of the info given, as if the evidence weren't already so obviously dubious.
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Exactly. They are taking both sides of the an argument to get credit but not take blame. They want credit for allegedly reducing crashes, but they don't want to be held responsible for driving into a wall.
Even if it was us... it probabbly wasn't!