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US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

reuters.com

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Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#571

Post by sokoloff »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #254
alexjplant wrote: post #216

> The collision happened because the sun was in the Tesla driver's eyes, so the Tesla driver was not charged, said Raul Garcia, public information officer for the department. Am I missing something or is this the gross miscarriage of justice that it sounds like? The driver could afford a $40k vehicle but not $20 polarized shades from Amazon? Negligence is negligence.

Negligence is negligence but people tend to view vehicle collisions as "accidents", as in random occurrences dealt by the hand of fate completely outside of anyone's control. As such, there is a chronic failure to charge motorists with negligence, even when they have killed someone. If you end up in court, just ask for a jury and you'll be okay. I'm pretty sure this guy didnt even go to court, sounds like it got pros…

Negligence is the failure to act with the level of care that a reasonable person would exercise in a similar situation; if a reasonable person likely would have done the things that led to that person’s death, they’re not guilty of negligence.

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#572

Post by watwut »

dekhn wrote: post #449
davidcalloway wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely not California but literally the first part of traffic law in Germany says that caution and consideration are required from all partaking in traffic. Germans are not known for poor driving.

Right- but the "consideration" here is the person merging onto the highway actually paying attention and adjusting, rather than pointedly not even looking (this is a very common merging behavior where I life). Changing lanes isn't without risk even on a clear day with good visibility. Seems like my suggestion of slowing down or speeding up makes perfect sense because it's less risky overall, and is still being consid…

Consideration is also making space for slower car wanting to merge and Germans do it.

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#573

Post by kelnos »

valval wrote: post #344
timabdulla wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it is dangerous in your anecdotes, why don't the reported numbers show more accidents when FSD is on? Even if it is true that the data show that with FSD (not Autopilot) enabled, drivers are in fewer crashes, I would be worried about other confounding factors. For instance, I would assume that drivers are more likely to engage FSD in situations of lower complexity (less traffic, little construction or other impe…

[flagged]

No, that's absolutely not how this works. Confounding factors are things that make your data not tell you what you are actually trying to understand. You can't just hand-wave that away, sorry.

Consider: what I expect is actually true based on the data is that Tesla FSD is as safe or safer than the average human driver, but only if the driver is paying attention and is ready to take over in case FSD does something unsafe, even if FSD doesn't warn the driver it needs to disengage.

That's not an autonomous driving system. Which is potentially fine, but the value prop of that system is low to me: I have to pay just as much attention as if I were driving manually, with the added problem that my attention is going to start to wander because the car is doing most of the work, and the longer the car successfully does most of the work, the more I'm going to unconsciously believe I can allow my attention to slip.

I do like current common ADAS features because they hit a good sweet spot: I still need to actively hold onto the wheel and handle initiating lane changes, turns, stopping and starting at traffic lights and stop signs, etc. I look at the ADAS as a sort of "backup" to my own driving, and not as what's primarily in control of the car. In contrast, Tesla FSD wants to be primarily in control of the car, but it's not trustworthy enough to do that without constant supervision.

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#574

Post by kelnos »

bastawhiz wrote: post #513
Uzza wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All manufacturers have for some time been required by regulators to report any accident where an autonomous or partially autonomous system was active within 30 seconds of an accident.

My question is better rephrased as "what is legally considered an accident that needs to be reported?" If the car scrapes a barricade or curbs it hard but the airbags don't deploy and the car doesn't sense the damage, clearly they don't. There's a wide spectrum of issues up to the point where someone is injured or another car is damaged.

And not to move the goalposts, but I think we should also be tracking any time the human driver feels they need to take control because the autonomous system did something they didn't believe was safe.

That's not a crash (fortunately!), but it is a failure of the autonomous system.

This is hard to track, though, of course: people might take over control for reasons unrelated to safety, or people may misinterpret something that's safe as unsafe. So you can't just track this from a simple "human driver took control".

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#575

Post by kelnos »

Uzza wrote: post #413
throwaway562if1 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AIUI the numbers are for accidents where FSD is in control. Which means if it does a turn into oncoming traffic and the driver yanks the wheel or slams the brakes 500ms before collision, it's not considered a crash during FSD.

That is not correct. Tesla counts any accident within 5 seconds of Autopilot/FSD turning off as the system being involved. Regulators extend that period to 30 seconds, and Tesla must comply with that when reporting to them.

How about when it turns into oncoming traffic, the driver yanks the wheel, manages to get back on track, and avoids a crash? Do we know how often things like that happen? Because that's also a failure of the system, and that should affect how reliable and safe we rate these things. I expect we don't have data on that.

Also how about: it turns into oncoming traffic, but there isn't much oncoming traffic, and that traffic swerves to get out of the way, before FSD realizes what it's done and pulls back into the correct lane. We certainly don't have data on that.

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#576

Post by kelnos »

potato3732842 wrote: post #465
bastawhiz wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just implies FSD is as good as a bad driver, which isn't really an endorsement.

I agree it's not an endorsement but we allow chronically bad drivers on the road as long as they're legally bad and not illegally bad.

We do that for reasons of practicality: the US is built around cars. If we were to revoke the licenses of the 20% worst drivers, most of those people would be unable to get to work and end up homeless.

So we accept that there are some bad drivers on the road because the alternative would be cruel.

But we don't have to accept bad software drivers.

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#577

Post by [deleted] »

davidcalloway wrote: post #447
dekhn wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since a number of people are giving pushback, can you point to any (California-oriented) driving instructions consistent with this? I'm not seeing any. I see people saying "it's curteous", but when I'm driving I'm managing hundreds of variables and changing lanes is often risky, given motorcycles lanesplitting at high speed (quite common).

Definitely not California but literally the first part of traffic law in Germany says that caution and consideration are required from all partaking in traffic. Germans are not known for poor driving.

[deleted]

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#578

Post by krisoft »

kergonath wrote: post #552
viraptor wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a dangerous line and I don't think it's correct. Software I write shouldn't be relied on in critical situations. If someone makes that decision then it's on them not on me. The line should be where a person tells others that they can rely on the software with their lives - as in the integrator for the end product. Even if I was working on the software for self driving, the same thing would apply - if I wrote s…

It’s not that complicated or outlandish. That’s how most engineering fields work. If a building collapses because of design flaws, then the builders and architects can be held responsible. Hell, if a car crashes because of a design or assembly flaw, the manufacturer is held responsible. Why should self-driving software be any different? If the software is not reliable enough, then don’t use it in a context where it c…

I think the example here is that the designer draws a bridge for a railway model, and someone decides to use the same design and sends real locomotives across it. Is the original designer (who neither intended nor could have foreseen this) liable in your understanding?

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#579

Post by notahacker »

jalapenos wrote: post #530
thunky wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can go to prison or die for being a bad driver, yet people choose to drive.

Arguing for the sake of it; you wouldn't take that risk reward. Most code has bugs from time to time even when highly skilled developers are being careful. None of them would drive if the fault rate was similar and the outcome was death.

Or to put even more straightforwardly: people who choose to drive rarely expect to drive more than a few 10s of k per year. People who choose to write autonomous software's lines of code potentially drive a billion miles per year, experiencing a lot more edge cases they are expected to handle in a non-dangerous manner, and have to handle them via advance planning and interactions with a lot of other people's code.

The only practical way around this which permits autonomous vehicles (which are apparently dependent on much more complex and intractable codebases than, say, avionics) is a much higher threshold of criminal responsibility than the "the serious consequences resulted from the one-off execution of an dangerous manoeuvre which couldn't be justified in context" which sends human drivers to jail. And of course that double standard will be problematic if "willingness to accept liability" is the only safety threshold.

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#580

Post by kelnos »

eric_cc wrote: post #476
itsoktocry wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These "works for me!" comments are exhausting. Nobody believes you "rarely intervene", otherwise Tesla themselves would be promoting the heck out of the technology. Bring on the videos of you in the passenger seat on FSD for any amount of time.

It’s the counter-point to the “it doesn’t work for me” posts. Are you okay with those ones?

I think the problem with the "it works for me" type posts is that most people reading them think the person writing it is trying to refute what the person with the problem is saying. As in, "it works for me, so the problem must be with you, not the car".

I will refrain from commenting on whether or not that's a fair assumption to make, but I think that's where the frustration comes from.

I think when people make "WFM" posts, it would go a long way to acknowledge that the person who had a problem really did have a problem, even if implicitly.

"That's a bummer; I've driven thousands of miles using FSD, and I've felt safe and have never had to intervene. I wonder what's different about our travel that's given us such different experiences."

That kind of thing would be a lot more palatable, I think, even if you might think it's silly/tiring/whatever to have to do that every time.

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