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Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

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Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#391

Post by paganel »

patcheudor wrote: post #107
tc wrote: post #18

Tesla probably shouldn't be saying anything about this at all, even just to avoid giving it more news cycles. But if they were going to say something, here's what they should have said the first time. ---- We take great care in building our cars to save lives. Forty thousands Americans die on the roads each year. That's a statistic. But even a single death of a Tesla driver or passenger is a tragedy. This has affecte…

>t's a tool to help attentive drivers avoid accidents that might have otherwise occurred. This needs far more discussion. I just don't buy it. I don't believe that you can have a car engaged in auto-drive mode and remain attentive. I think our psychology won't allow it. When driving, I find that I must be engaged and on long trips I don't even enable cruise control because taking the accelerator input away from me is…

> When driving, I find that I must be engaged and on long trips I don't even enable cruise control because taking the accelerator input away from me is enough to cause my mind to wander.

Glad I'm not the only doing it. When driving on a highway I increase or decrease my car's speed by 10-15 km every 10 minutes or so, so that this variation can help me keep attentive about my surroundings.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#392

Post by mschuster91 »

lmm wrote: post #324
Dylan16807 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you going to having a train running every few minutes to really make the delays comparable? And you need a fleet of rental cars so that people can actually get to their destination. What's the relative cost of all that vs. pavement?

> Are you going to having a train running every few minutes to really make the delays comparable? Commuter rail systems run at 2 minute headways or less. Long-distance trains mostly don't but that's largely due to excessive safety standards - for some reason we regulate trains to a much higher safety standard than cars. Even then, the higher top speeds of trains can make up for a certain amount of waiting and indirec…

> for some reason we regulate trains to a much higher safety standard than cars

That "some reason" is physics. According to a quick Google search, an average race car needs 400m of track length from 300 km/h to 0 km/h. A train will require something around 2500m, over 5x the distance, to brake from the same speed. Trains top out at -1.1m/s² deceleration, an ordinary car can get -10m/s² deceleration.

Part of the reason why is also that in a car, people are generally using their seatbelts - which means you can safely hit the brakes with full power. In a train, however, people will be walking around, standing, taking a dump on the loo - and no one will be using a belt. Unless you want to send people literally flying through the carriages, you can't go very much over that 1 m/s² barrier.

Because of this, you have the requirement of signalling blocks spaced in a way that a train at full speed can still come to a full stop before the next block signal. Also: a train can carry thousands of people. Have one train derail and crash into e.g. a bridge or crash with another train and you're looking with way, way, way more injuries and dead people than even a megacity could support, much less in a rural area.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#393

Post by thegeekpirate »

zaidf wrote: post #129

"The reason the other families aren't on TV are because their loved ones are still alive." Wow, this sounds like a horrible, tasteless burn to end the statement with. And I am a Tesla fan.

Shocked you're the first to mention this, I was speechless after reading it.

Whoever was responsible for that line _really_ needs a little bit of empathy, especially when their product is partially at fault for causing this debacle in the first place.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#394

Post by seppel »

Ryudas wrote: post #247
Dwolb wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla need to stop calling it 'Autopilot'. The name implies drivers don't need to drive and is most likely a big reason drivers are lured into a false sense of security.

I find this argument so often. Autopilot has never been a term for autonomous, just as its used in aviation. Just because people don't know the proper term or have an erroneous idea of the term, doesn't mean tesla has to have the burden of people misinterpreting what it says.

> Autopilot has never been a term for autonomous, just as its used in aviation.

Autopilots used in modern commercial airplanes are autonomous. You don't have to watch them, they will do their job. The airplane is either controlled by the pilots or the autopilot. There is a protocol to transfer the control between pilots and the autopilot, such that it is clear who is in charge of controlling the plane (there's even a protocol to transfer this between pilots).

The autopilot will signal when it is no longer able to control the plane (because of, e.g., technical faults in the sensors).

Yes, there are also autopilots in smaller airplanes which are more or less just a cruise control. But everything in between, where is it unclear who is doing what are where the limits of the capabilities are, have been scrapped because people died.

> doesn't mean tesla has to have the burden of people misinterpreting what it says.

Because Tesla is so pretty clear in stating what their autopilot is able to do and what not.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#395

Post by alpos »

flokie wrote: post #263
tc wrote: post #18

Tesla probably shouldn't be saying anything about this at all, even just to avoid giving it more news cycles. But if they were going to say something, here's what they should have said the first time. ---- We take great care in building our cars to save lives. Forty thousands Americans die on the roads each year. That's a statistic. But even a single death of a Tesla driver or passenger is a tragedy. This has affecte…

That news footage in the linked article looks exactly like this scenario: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/8a0jfh/autopil... Should a product that flawed really be deployed on an honor system basis?

How should one deploy such a product at all? Actual usage is really the only way anyone will know if the models are trained appropriately to handle most/all situations they will encounter in the real world.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#396

Post by Retric »

patcheudor wrote: post #107
tc wrote: post #18

Tesla probably shouldn't be saying anything about this at all, even just to avoid giving it more news cycles. But if they were going to say something, here's what they should have said the first time. ---- We take great care in building our cars to save lives. Forty thousands Americans die on the roads each year. That's a statistic. But even a single death of a Tesla driver or passenger is a tragedy. This has affecte…

>t's a tool to help attentive drivers avoid accidents that might have otherwise occurred. This needs far more discussion. I just don't buy it. I don't believe that you can have a car engaged in auto-drive mode and remain attentive. I think our psychology won't allow it. When driving, I find that I must be engaged and on long trips I don't even enable cruise control because taking the accelerator input away from me is…

Your belief is meaningless, we have hard data that shows a net benefit to these systems.

It's not a question of zero deaths, it's a question of reducing the number which means you need to look beyond individual events. Remember the ~90 people who died yesterday from a US car accident without making the news are far more important than a few individuals.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#397

Post by danso »

slg wrote: post #350
danso wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The text at the top of the homepage for Tesla Autopilot is this: > Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars > 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. Whatever theory you have for Tesla's naming of their feature, it doesn't match with their marketing.

You are reading into that text more than you should. Autopilot and full self-driving are two separate features. Autopilot can be used today. Full self-driving can be purchased today but won't be activated until some unknown future date. Those features are separate configurable options when purchasing the car that come with their own prices. Tesla makes it clear enough that any owner should know those are two separate…

> You are reading into that text more than you should.

The page's title is "Autopilot | Tesla". It is the first result for "tesla autopilot" in search results. And "autopilot" appears 9 times on the page. So if that's not an intentional attempt to mislead consumers into conflating Autopilot with "full self-driving", then what would such an attempt look like, hypothetically?

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#398

Post by zaroth »

gamblor956 wrote: post #362
zaroth wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep seeing statements to this effect, and they are incorrect. The comparison is between Tesla cars with and without the AutoPilot feature installed. The statistic has nothing to do with people not driving a Tesla. “...airbag deployment crashes in the subject Tesla vehicles before and after Autosteer installation. The data show that the Tesla vehicles crash rate dropped by almost 40 percent after Autosteer installa…

The bigger problem is that their study seems to have revealed that while crashes went down, the severity of the crashes went up. People weren't dying in their Teslas before Autosteer, but now we're looking at 4 deaths and counting in the space of 2 years, all directly attributable to the use of Autopilot.

Okay lets move the goalposts.

> People weren’t dying in their Tesla’s before Autosteer

This is false. Although Tesla fatalities tend to be a bit over the top like driving off cliffs, or stolen car escape gone wrong type of situations, there have certainly been non-Autopilot related fatalities in Teslas.

> but now we're looking at 4 deaths and counting in the space of 2 years

This is false. There have been 2 fatalities in Tesla’s which are known to have been operating with Autopilot at the time. There was also one fatality in China where the family claims autopilot was on at the time but Wikipedia states this was not confirmed.

> all directly attributable to the use of Autopilot.

I take issue with “directly attributable” simply based on NTSB (a neutral 3rd party if ever there was one) disagreeing with that. They found Autopilot was not at fault in the Florida crash. I think a neutral fact-finder would defer to the NTSB and rank your claim as false.

But finally, you disregard the obvious flaw in your logic, which is you can’t possibly know how many potentially fatal crashes or maimings have been avoided due to AutoPilot, except the one thing we do know is that airbags in Teslas are deploying 40% less with the feature than without.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#399

Post by slg »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #380
slg wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are drawing those conclusions with only half of the equation. Like I said in my previous comment, neither of us know how many accidents were prevented or lives saved by that update.

>Like I said in my previous comment, neither of us know how many accidents were prevented or lives saved by that update. Then why are you making assumptions about it, then? >You are drawing those conclusions with only half of the equation. No, I'm not. The facts are: there was a problem that was reported to Tesla, Tesla ignored that problem, and now someone is dead because of that problem. No further information is n…

I said Tesla failed in my first comment. I am not defending them regarding this particular accident. I am simply explaining the potential logic behind their decisions and why this single failure doesn't mean their approach is inherently wrong. The only assumption I am making is that Tesla has good intentions with their aggressive autopilot releases.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#400

Post by Bizarro »

almost_usual wrote: post #311
lorenzorhoades wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a key point that will result in the freedom of being able to drive being stripped long before assault rifles. Imagine if i create a private road from SF to LA and say that only self driving cars can drive on it. The vehicles on this road are all inter-connected, allowing them to travel at speeds in excess of 150+ MPH, and since the road that i've created is completely flat it still allows it to be a…

So you exit the self driving private road to enter a public road where there are still local residents who insist on driving their own vehicle. Some of these residents have never been to location X and have no interest in it. They care about their neighborhood and getting around however they want. The point is driving is a freedom and getting rid of it in this country will be hard. I'd imagine self driving vehicles h…

You'll see municipalities and then states banning cars starting off using soft incentive based approaches, then harder approaches once enough people switch over.

Many states (red) won't ban them for a very long time.

the impact on freedom to travel will have to be secured and decentralized without any government kill switches.

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