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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

#601

Post by kelnos »

V99 wrote: post #430
gambiting wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>. How about a quarter? Or a tenth? The answer is zero. An airplane autopilot has increased the overall safety of airplanes by several orders of magnitude compared to human pilots, but literally no errors in its operation are tolerated, whether they are deadly or not. The exact same standard has to apply to cars or any automated machine for that matter. If there is any issue discovered in any car with this tech then…

Airplane autopilots follow a lateral & sometimes vertical path through the sky prescribed by the pilot(s). They are good at doing that. This does increase safety, because it frees up the pilot(s) from having to carefully maintain a straight 3d line through the sky for hours at a time. But they do not listen to ATC. They do not know where other planes are. They do not keep themselves away from other planes. Or the gro…

Thank you for this. The number of people conflating Tesla's Autopilot with an airliner's autopilot, and expecting that use and policies and situations surrounding the two should be directly comparable, is staggering. You'd think people would be better at critical thinking with this, but... here we are.

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

#602

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

ywvcbk wrote: post #539
TheCleric wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah any automaker doing this would just negotiate a flat rate per car in the US and the insurer would average the danger to make a rate. This would be much cheaper than the average individual’s cost for liability on their insurance.

What if someone gets killed because of some clear bug/error and the jury decides to award 100s of millions just for that single ? I’m not sure it’s trivial to insurance companies to account for that sort of risk

Not trivial, but that is exactly the kind of thing that successful insurance companies factor into their premiums, or specifically exclude those scenarios (e.g. not covering war zones for house insurance).

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

#603

Post by kelnos »

akira2501 wrote: post #276
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #226

The interesting question is how good self-driving has to be before people tolerate it. It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. How about a quarter? Or a tenth? Accidents caused by human drivers are one of the largest causes of injury and death, but they're not newsworthy the way an accident involving automated driving is. It's all too easy to se…

> traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. It's completely acceptable. In fact the numbers are lower than they have been since we've started driving. > Accidents caused by human drivers Are there any other types of drivers? > are one of the largest causes of injury and death More than half the fatalities on the road are actually caused by the use of drugs and alcohol. The statistics are very clear on thi…

> Are there any other types of drivers [than human drivers]?

Waymo says yes, there are.

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

#604

Post by kelnos »

blargey wrote: post #303
akira2501 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. It's completely acceptable. In fact the numbers are lower than they have been since we've started driving. > Accidents caused by human drivers Are there any other types of drivers? > are one of the largest causes of injury and death More than half the fatalities on the road are actually caused by the use of drugs and alcohol. The statistics are very clear on thi…

> Non impaired people drive orders of magnitude better. That raises the question - how many impaired driver-miles are being baked into the collision statistics for "median human" driver-miles? Shouldn't we demand non-impaired driving as the standard for automation, rather than "averaged with drunk / phone-fiddling /senile" driving? We don't give people N-mile allowances for drunk driving based on the size of the drun…

No, that makes no sense, because we can't ensure that human drivers aren't impaired. We test and compare against the reality, not the ideal we'd prefer.

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

#605

Post by kelnos »

Terr_ wrote: post #334
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #226

The interesting question is how good self-driving has to be before people tolerate it. It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. How about a quarter? Or a tenth? Accidents caused by human drivers are one of the largest causes of injury and death, but they're not newsworthy the way an accident involving automated driving is. It's all too easy to se…

> It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. Even if we optimistically assume no "gotchas" in the statistics [0], distilling performance down to a casualty/injury/accident-rate can still be dangerously reductive, when the have a different distribution of failure-modes which do/don't mesh with our other systems and defenses. A quick thought experime…

Re: gotchas: an even easier one is that the Tesla FSD statistics don't include when the car does something unsafe and the driver intervenes and takes control, averting a crash.

How often does that happen? We have no idea. Tesla can certainly tell when a driver intervenes, but they can't count every occurrence as safety-related, because a driver might take control for all sorts of reasons.

This is why we can make stronger statements about the safety of Waymo. Their software was only tested by people trained and paid to test it, who were also recording every time they had to intervene because of safety, even if there was no crash. That's a metric they could track and improve.

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

#606

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

renewiltord wrote: post #462
TheCleric wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lots of people are asking how good the self driving has to be before we tolerate it. There’s a simple answer to this. As soon as it’s good enough for Tesla to accept liability for accidents. Until then if Tesla doesn’t trust it, why should I?

This is how I feel about nuclear energy. Every single plant should need to form a full insurance fund dedicated to paying out if there’s trouble. And the plant should have strict liability: anything that happens from materials it releases are its responsibility. But people get upset about this. We need corporations to take responsibility.

That's not a workable idea as it'd just encourage corporations to obfuscate the ownership of the plant (e.g. shell companies) and drastically underestimate the actual risks of catastrophes. Ultimately, the government will be left holding the bill for nuclear catastrophes, so it's better to just recognise that and get the government to regulate the energy companies.

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

#607

Post by londons_explore »

eric_cc wrote: post #382
jvanderbot wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have yet to see a difference. I let it highway drive for an hour and it cut off a semi, coming within 9 to 12 inches of the bumper for no reason. I heard about that one believe me. It got stuck in a side street trying to get to a target parking lot, shaking the wheel back and forth. It's no better so far and this is the first day.

Is it possible you have a lemon? Genuine question. I’ve had nothing but positive experiences with FSD for the last several months and many thousands of miles.

I suspect the performance might vary widely depending on if you're on a road in california they have a lot of data on, or if its a road FSD has rarely seen before.

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

#608

Post by josefx »

modeless wrote: post #312
bastawhiz wrote: post #257

Lots of people are asking how good the self driving has to be before we tolerate it. I got a one month free trial of FSD and turned it off after two weeks. Quite simply: it's dangerous. - It failed with a cryptic system error while driving - It started making a left turn far too early that would have scraped the left side of the car on a sign. I had to manually intervene. - In my opinion, the default setting accelera…

Tesla jumped the gun on the FSD free trial earlier this year. It was nowhere near good enough at the time. Most people who tried it for the first time probably share your opinion. That said, there is a night and day difference between FSD 12.3 that you experienced earlier this year and the latest version 12.6. It will still make mistakes from time to time but the improvement is massive and obvious. More importantly,…

> it will be quite good within a year

The regressions are getting worse. For the first release anouncement it was only hitting regulatory hurdles and now the entire software stack is broken? They should fire whoever is in charge and restore the state Elon tried to release a decade ago.

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

#609

Post by kelnos »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #261
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #226

The interesting question is how good self-driving has to be before people tolerate it. It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. How about a quarter? Or a tenth? Accidents caused by human drivers are one of the largest causes of injury and death, but they're not newsworthy the way an accident involving automated driving is. It's all too easy to se…

I think we should not be satisfied with merely “better than a human”. Flying is so safe precisely because we treat any casualty as unacceptable. We should aspire to make automobiles at least that safe.

I don't think the question was what we should be satisfied with or what we should aspire to. I absolutely agree with you that we should strive to make autonomous driving as safe as airline travel.

But the question was when should we allow autonomous driving on our public roads. And I think "when it's at least as safe as the median human driver" is a reasonable threshold.

(The thing about Tesla FSD is that it -- unsupervised -- would probably fall super short of that metric. FSD needs to be supervised to be safer than the median human driver, assuming that's evn currently the case, and not every driver is going to be equally good at supervising it.)

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

#610

Post by londons_explore »

snypher wrote: post #355
modeless wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla jumped the gun on the FSD free trial earlier this year. It was nowhere near good enough at the time. Most people who tried it for the first time probably share your opinion. That said, there is a night and day difference between FSD 12.3 that you experienced earlier this year and the latest version 12.6. It will still make mistakes from time to time but the improvement is massive and obvious. More importantly,…

So just a few more years of death and injury until they reach a finished product?

So far, data points to it having far fewer crashes than a human alone. Teslas data shows that, but 3rd party data seems to imply the same.
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