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Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

latimes.com

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Re: Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

#41

Post by organsnyder »

chrisseaton wrote: post #30
c3534l wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way to stay attentive behind the wheel is to actually be the one driving. There's virtually no way of being both attentive and passive for long periods of time. If a driver can't check their email or whatever on their phone while autopilot is on, then autopilot is not safe to put in cars. And while I'm okay with not-exactly-safe for most things people willingly consume or use, driving is not an area where it…

> There's virtually no way of being both attentive and passive for long periods of time. How do aircraft pilots manage it?

Extensive training, restriction of hours worked, health restrictions (pretty sure my ADHD would prevent me from being a commercial pilot)...

Also, my understanding is that aircraft autopilot systems are designed to allow for pilot response to take up to three seconds. Three seconds on the highway is a lifetime.

Re: Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

#42

Post by organsnyder »

danhak wrote: post #12
vkou wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the point of a self-driving system where you need to stay attentive behind the wheel? The physical act of turning a wheel isn't the hard part of driving. Paying attention is.

> The physical act of turning a wheel isn't the hard part of driving. Paying attention is. As an avid user of Tesla Autopilot I'll disagree with this. On a long road trip, monitoring my surroundings and making sure everything is generally ok is far less fatiguing than making constant microadjustments to steering, speed and following distance. Even while paying close attention to the ride, long trips (especially in st…

I've noticed the same thing driving my Chrysler Pacifica, which has lane keeping and adaptive cruise (with FCW). But it's not called "autopilot", and it deactivates if it detects that my hands are off the wheel.

Re: Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

#43

Post by m463 »

olliej wrote: post #23
kazinator wrote: post #16

> The vehicle’s design “permitted the driver to disengage from the driving task” Which vehicle's design does not permit a driver to disengage from the driving task?

Autopilot. By design it encourages drivers to stop paying any attention - the fact that it has a “signal the driver” to try and maintain driver focus indicates that the core design produces this behavior. If the core design produces the same behavior, in a large enough portion of the user base to require such a feature, that’s a fairly good indication that the core design is causing a problem.

You are answering the opposite of the question.

all cars allow you to stop paying attention.

I think the idea behind autopilot is that it reduces your workload (like cruise control, or automatic wipers, or automatic headlights or any other labor-saving device)

Re: Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

#44

Post by rayiner »

Animats wrote: post #11

Figure 7 depicts the movement of the Tesla and the two lead vehicles in the last 15 seconds before the crash. In the left panel—covering 15 to 8 seconds before impact—the Tesla is accelerating from 9 to 18 mph while following a lead vehicle (red car) at 30 to 46 feet.In the middle panel—covering 7 to 4 seconds before impact—the Tesla is traveling at a constant 21 mph while following a lead vehicle (green car) at a di…

It may not be fixed. My 2019 Subaru, also a camera based system, does exactly the same thing (accelerate towards stationary traffic when the car in front changes lanes). And car and driver found at least with the 2018 Model S that it performed somewhat worse than Subaru on avoiding stationary objects.

Re: Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

#45

Post by alexanderh »

Even with Autopilot, everyone I know who owns one: Its their little baby... they don't even dare risk it, at all. These people doing stuff like this are either really stupid, or really rich... or both. Because I have never seen anyone I know dare drive recklessly with autopilot.

Re: Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

#47

Post by torpfactory »

I think we should look at this probabilistically. Yes, autopilot should be improved to prevent this, but no system is perfect. Certainly not human drivers. IMO the correct comparison is whether Teslas are on average more likely to hit firetrucks while on autopilot than normal vehicles while being driven by humans.

I'm sure this data most likely won't be forthcoming, but I think it's important to keep in mind that we should be looking at accidents fleet-wide and not in isolation. Autonomously driven cars will have accidents. More importantly, their failure modes will be different than human drivers. However, as soon as they are even a small margin safer than human drivers, their adoption would save lives. Besides, the systems will continue to get better. Human drivers have proven stubbornly difficult to improve.

We ought not reject autonomous driving technology only because it sometimes gets in accidents that appear to be strange or arbitrary to us. I consider the carnage perpetrated by human drivers to be arbitrary, but most people just take death on the roads as a fact of life.

Re: Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

#48

Post by diminoten »

macintux wrote: post #15
diminoten wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is certainly okay when the rates at which these things happen is lower than the rates at which non-self driving cars have accidents. A 0% accident rate is unrealistic and unfair.

Statistics makes for a tough sell to the survivors. “Yes, this autonomous vehicle killed your son who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but someone else’s son would have died in an unrelated accident somewhere else were it not for autonomy.”

Striving for 0 accidents and only accepting 0 accidents are two very different things...

Re: Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

#49

Post by schiffern »

smt88 wrote: post #18
dreamcompiler wrote: post #9

Fire truck driver here: People crash into parked fire trucks and ambulances and cop cars all the damn time . That's why we park the Big Red Truck at an angle behind the accident -- so that when the 2-ton car crashes into the 30-ton truck, the car will bounce off and the people behind the truck (us) won't be injured. I don't disagree that Tesla's software is partly to blame here, but the null experiment also has a lou…

The null experiment is the human driver of that particular Tesla, not an average of all drivers

So if the crash didn't involve "the human driver of that particular Tesla" but instead was an identical incident with a different Tesla driver, we wouldn't be having this conversation? Because that seems highly improbable.

This particular driver isn't what makes the story special or newsworthy. The nature of the incident is. Our choice of statistical cohort should reflect this data selection effect, ie "all Autopilot miles driven," not "all miles driven by ."

Re: Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405

#50

Post by rictic »

macintux wrote: post #15
diminoten wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is certainly okay when the rates at which these things happen is lower than the rates at which non-self driving cars have accidents. A 0% accident rate is unrealistic and unfair.

Statistics makes for a tough sell to the survivors. “Yes, this autonomous vehicle killed your son who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but someone else’s son would have died in an unrelated accident somewhere else were it not for autonomy.”

Ambulances save some number of lives. Ambulances are involved in some number of fatal accidents.

Should ambulances be banned? Subsidized? I can imagine different ways of analyzing the question, but asking "what would you say to the families of those who die" is a nonstarter. There's nothing you can say that will be satisfying, or ease their pain.

Statistics may be cold, but they're the only tool that actually lets us answer the questions like "would fewer people die with or without this change"?

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