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An Update on Last Week’s Accident

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Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#421

Post by SerLava »

_pmf_ wrote: post #228
mickronome wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I find it deplorable that several companies are essentially using people, although in this case apparently willing, participants in testing auto pilot or autonomous driving software. I also find the lack of prominent road markings, signage, or any significant shock absorbing zone simply astonishing! It makes me wonder, is that layout actually on purpose? I truly find it hard to believe that a road or traffic au…

What irks me is that they think it's OK for them to advertise it as auto-pilot, with an asterisk pointing to the fine print that says "aw shucks, not actually, haha".

Absolutely.

It's a marketing term, and they are intentionally committing murder by the act of not calling it "LaneAssist" or some other similarly boring name.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#422

Post by zmarty »

Amezarak wrote: post #279
mtgx wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, ever notice how in none of the Tesla Autopilot accidents, Tesla finds itself guilty? I don't even read these posts from Tesla anymore because I know each one of them is just justification for how Tesla did nothing wrong, and it's the fault of the stupid human driver for using its Autopilot "wrong" and dying in the process. Meanwhile, Tesla is laughing all the way to the bank selling the usage of Autopilot as on…

Tesla's huge success in people's mindspace of self-driving vehicles is baffling to me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but these are the self-driving features in Teslas: - Cruise control maintains speed, will automatically decelerate if a car in front slows down, speed back up if they speed or go away, etc. - Collision avoidance: the car will automatically emergency brake if it believes a collision is imminent. - Lanekeepin…

Yeah, I'm going to call BS on this one. More specifically, on the lanekeeping claim. The current non-Tesla implementations are worse or much more limited at the price point you mentioned (and frankly, at most price points).

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#423

Post by Amezarak »

zmarty wrote: post #422
Amezarak wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla's huge success in people's mindspace of self-driving vehicles is baffling to me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but these are the self-driving features in Teslas: - Cruise control maintains speed, will automatically decelerate if a car in front slows down, speed back up if they speed or go away, etc. - Collision avoidance: the car will automatically emergency brake if it believes a collision is imminent. - Lanekeepin…

Yeah, I'm going to call BS on this one. More specifically, on the lanekeeping claim. The current non-Tesla implementations are worse or much more limited at the price point you mentioned (and frankly, at most price points).

All I can tell you is that the Honda lanekeeping does everything I would expect or want, and its the only one I have a lot of experience with. The only thing that annoys me is that it requires you touch the wheel every now and then.

Can you elucidate on what tesla lanekeeping does that others don't?

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#424

Post by andrewprock »

watertom wrote: post #311
wilun wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla always blame the "driver" (and publicly so, nonetheless) when they are killed by their "autopilot" (which is actually driving, that is fulfilling the purpose indicated by its name, despite being not very good at it...) -- either directly, or by carefully stating misleading statements that are both technically correct and incredibly dishonest in the context of both the events and the surrounding text. Why people…

You know how many plane crashes are not the fault of human error? Very few. I have a friend that investigates planet crashes. He’s told me that between pilot error, human error, hubris, flying when conditions are too dangerous, poorly trained or sloppy mechanics only about about 1% really can’t be classified as being caused by humans. He said the stats are a bit skewed because like any organization that reports on hu…

Human error is distinct from driver/pilot error. It's possible (though quite unlikely) that there 0% pilot error in all plane crashes, and 99% human error.

Given that plane auotpilots are roughly comparable with Tesla's autopilots, one wonders how many plane crashes have occurred while the plane was in autopilot, and what fraction of those crashes were attributed to pilot error.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#425

Post by hexane360 »

adamlett wrote: post #239
saalweachter wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a RADAR problem, it’s a world modeling problem. So you’re sending out pulses and listening for echos, which tells you how far away something is in a particular direction. You correlate subsequent pulses to say whether the object is moving toward you or away. If you have a car 50 m ahead of you every time you ping, everything is good. Now that car suddenly swerves around a car stopped in front of it, and y…

That’s not how it works in my limited understanding. Radars don’t just detect the positions of object, but also their relative speed. For this, they take advantage of the Doppler effect. When a pulse gets reflected, its frequency rises if the object is moving towards the radar, and falls if it’s moving away.

Although there's an inherent trade-off between detecting position and speed. Longer pulses give more accurate frequency/speed detection, while short pulses give more accurate time/position detection. This is the same phenomenon that underlies Heisenberg uncertainty.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#426

Post by m4x »

femto113 wrote: post #389
pja wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They can be far more specific: just tell us how Model S drivers without (or not using) Autopilot do compared to those with and using it. This would control almost every variable except Autopilot. I find the fact that they don't release this number as extremely damning.

Somebody has tried to do this [1]. It would be nice to see this analysis from Tesla themselves. As you say, we can probably guess why we haven't.

[1]: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1107109_teslas-own-numb...

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#427

Post by jakecopp »

crdoconnor wrote: post #317
jakecopp wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your intention, though isn't it inevitable self driving cars will kill people even if they are 1000x safer than humans? If a CEO has many millions of cars running his software, their will always be a death. In that case, nobody would want to take on that responsibility so nobody would build self driving cars. Therefore humans will still drive cars and there will be 1000x more deaths, most preventable wit…

It's not the trolley problem because as yet we don't know how many people would be killed by rolling out self driving cars and, more to the point, the speed of rollout and safety are not necessarily inversely proportional. By characterising self driving cars as a "trolley problem" you have presented what is known as a "false dilemma". Maybe you could read up on that ;)

Good point! Are there any publicly accessible crash/death statistics for cars with a similar price/safety/demographic profile as Teslas?

I feel that is the only way we could isolate for self driving and not other factors.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#428

Post by microtherion »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #385
ddalex wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your car is going to testify against you. Presumably Tesla/the car is telling the truth as it saw it. I don't think you're suggesting they're falsifying the logs. > Which is a terrible way to treat a customer I'd assume that Tesla sells you a vehicle, not PR or legal services that protect you in case of an accident. Your expectation that Tesla should take the blame is unreasonable by any standard.

I'm not saying Tesla is lying. But I am saying that I could spend six figures on a car from a company that is ready and waiting to stab me in the back. Or, I could spend five figures on a Toyota, knowing that Toyota is not going to sell me out if my car crashes. I mean, look, it makes sense Tesla has to defend itself, especially legally, but there's a big difference between pulling out the logs when you need to for t…

As far as I can tell, Toyota (or other car manufacturers) would be just as inclined to argue driver error in crashes (especially once involved in litigation). See e.g. https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_... for a discussion of some Toyota crashes.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#429

Post by empath75 »

rgbrenner wrote: post #71
danso wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider this graf: > In the US, there is one automotive fatality every 86 million miles across all vehicles from all manufacturers. For Tesla, there is one fatality, including known pedestrian fatalities, every 320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware. If you are driving a Tesla equipped with Autopilot hardware, you are 3.7 times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident. Let's put aside t…

Also, they've had 3 fatalities so far. If one fully occupied model x (5 people) crashes and kills everyone... it's back to the average. If the people in the other car die too, it's less than average. That safety advantage can be wiped out in a single accident. Tesla has been lucky that all 3 have been occupied by a single person.

Tesla’s aren’t exactly minivans. I doubt there are a lot of families driving around with them.

I really think Tesla is jumping the gun with autopilot.

Re: An Update on Last Week’s Accident

#430

Post by ineedasername »

emn13 wrote: post #417
ineedasername wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

autopilots do a bit more than maintain course, they can basically execute the entire flight-plan in between takeoff & landing, which includes plenty of heading adjustments. They also increasingly do a fair bit of heavy lifting on landings as well.

A plane is much easier to navigate because there aren't things like lane-dividers floating about. That's handy, but alas it does not apply to driving a car. Just because an in-air navigation aid that allows for essentially pilot-free navigation deserving of the name "autopilot" happens to be relatively trivial to build, does not mean any navigation aid of similar complexity for other modes of transport should be call…

I think what I'm taking issue with isn't anything about comparing them to self driving cars, it's that you characterize them as "trivial to build". They are not. They coordinate a significant number of life-critical systems, react to minute perturbations in the air stream with microsecond precision, and do so with such a high level of precision that human pilots are often forbidden from overriding them outside of specific situations. I don't know what gave you the impression that these systems were basic or trivial, but they have been at the cutting edge of systems automation for decades.
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