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NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

arstechnica.com

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Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#71

Post by stetrain »

ckastner wrote: post #59
Animats wrote: post #42

NTSB: • At 8 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was following a lead vehicle and was traveling about 65 mph. • At 7 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla began a left steering movement while following a lead vehicle. • At 4 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was no longer following a lead vehicle. • At 3 seconds prior to the crash and up to the time of impact with the crash attenuator, the Tesla’s speed increas…

> This is the Tesla self-crashing car in action. Remember how it works. It visually recognizes rear ends of cars using a BW camera I'm sure Tesla's engineers are qualified and it is certainly easy to second-guess them, but it is beyond me why they would even consider a BW camera in a context where warning colors (red signs, red cones, black and yellow stripes, etc.) are an essential element of the domain.

The cameras in Tesla's non-Mobileye cars are grey grey red. Supposedly this gives you higher detail resolution while still being able to differentiate important sign colors.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/798886670468644865

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#72

Post by TheForumTroll »

martin_bech wrote: post #33
jakobegger wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, „hands were not detected“ does not mean that they really weren‘t on the wheel. Maybe someone who drives a Tesla can comment on how reliable the hand detection is.

Hand detection is pretty good. You only need to rest your hands on the wheel. Have a model s as my daily driver.

Lots of drivers have problems where they have to "shake" the wheel to make the car understand that they do indeed have their hands on the wheel. The system is pretty rubbish.

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#73

Post by rcxdude »

baconmania wrote: post #61
Animats wrote: post #42

NTSB: • At 8 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was following a lead vehicle and was traveling about 65 mph. • At 7 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla began a left steering movement while following a lead vehicle. • At 4 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was no longer following a lead vehicle. • At 3 seconds prior to the crash and up to the time of impact with the crash attenuator, the Tesla’s speed increas…

What's your source for the claim that Tesla's system "doesn't detect stationary objects"? From the reference frame of a moving Tesla, both globally stationary and globally moving objects will appear to be in motion.

Yes, but the radar has poor angular resolution (but a good idea of relative velocity), so it cannot tell the difference between a stationary object at the side of the road and one in the middle of it, so it must ignore all stationary object (by ignoring all objects with an apparent velocity approximately equal to the speed of the vehicle) in order to avoid constant false positives.

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#74

Post by jfrankamp »

Animats wrote: post #42

NTSB: • At 8 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was following a lead vehicle and was traveling about 65 mph. • At 7 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla began a left steering movement while following a lead vehicle. • At 4 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was no longer following a lead vehicle. • At 3 seconds prior to the crash and up to the time of impact with the crash attenuator, the Tesla’s speed increas…

To follow on, there has already been reported autopilot drifting and mismanaging that spot on the freeway (although without this catastrophic result). That fact adds to this description/explanation.

Aside: the following another car heuristic is dumb. It's ultimately offloading the AI/decision making work onto another agent, an unknown agent. You could probably have a train of teslas following eachother following a dummy car that crashes into a wall and they'd all do it. A car 'leading' in front that drifts into a metal pole will become a stationary object and so undetectable.

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#75

Post by tptacek »

binarybits wrote: post #46
Animats wrote: post #42

NTSB: • At 8 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was following a lead vehicle and was traveling about 65 mph. • At 7 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla began a left steering movement while following a lead vehicle. • At 4 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was no longer following a lead vehicle. • At 3 seconds prior to the crash and up to the time of impact with the crash attenuator, the Tesla’s speed increas…

Tesla cut ties with Mobileye in 2016, and this was a 2017 Model X, so it probably wasn't running Mobileye's software.

Pedantic: Mobileye cut ties with Tesla, not the other way around.

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#76

Post by raldi »

Animats wrote: post #42

NTSB: • At 8 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was following a lead vehicle and was traveling about 65 mph. • At 7 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla began a left steering movement while following a lead vehicle. • At 4 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was no longer following a lead vehicle. • At 3 seconds prior to the crash and up to the time of impact with the crash attenuator, the Tesla’s speed increas…

> The paint on the right edge of the gore marking, as seen in Google Maps, is worn

Indeed; here's a close-up of the critical area. Note that the darker stripe on the bottom of the photo is NOT the crucial one; the one that the car was supposed to follow is the much more faded one above that that you can barely see:

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.410912,-122.0757037,3a,75y,2...

(Note that I'm not blaming the faded paint; it's a totally normal situation on freeways that it's entirely the job of the self-driving car to handle correctly. But I think it was what triggered this fatal flaw.)

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#77

Post by jumelles »

curiousgal wrote: post #39
jackson1way wrote: post #30

Despite the autopilot failure, I find the battery failure quite remarkable too: > The car was towed to an impound lot, but the vehicle's batteries weren't finished burning. A few hours after the crash, "the Tesla battery emanated smoke and audible venting." Five days later, the smoldering battery reignited, requiring another visit from the fire department. Where is your LiPo god now? Batteries have more energy densit…

Battery failure? You're expecting their engineers to design a battery that remains safe after a 70mph crash into a barrier?

Yes? Welcome to the automotive industry. Lives are at stake.

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#78

Post by stetrain »

MBCook wrote: post #70

So people are asking why the barrier wasn’t detected, and that’s fair. Here’s another question: why wasn’t the ‘gore’ zone detected? Why did the car thing it was safe to drive over and area with striped white lines covering the pavement? It saw the white line on the side of that area and decided that was a land market but ignored the striped area you’re not supposed to drive on? If you’re reading the lines on the pav…

This gore zone did not have a striped area, just solid lines on each side.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5582461/Tesla...

Edit: Google street view of the location: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.410912,-122.0757037,3a,75y,2...

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#79

Post by abalone »

> During the 18-minute 55-second segment, the vehicle provided two visual alerts and one auditory alert for the driver to place his hands on the steering wheel. These alerts were made more than 15 minutes prior to the crash.

Whoah. So there were NO alerts for 15 minutes prior to the crash. Compare this with Tesla's earlier statement:

> The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive and the driver’s hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision.[1]

This gives a very different impression. They omitted the fact that there were no warnings for 15 minutes. Frankly that appears to be an intentionally misleading omission.

So basically the driver was distracted for 6 seconds while believing that the car was auto-following the car in front of it.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week’s-accident

Re: NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

#80

Post by testplzignore »

mymacbook wrote: post #27

Reading that initial report is terrifying. I am so glad the NTSB set the record straight that the driver had his hands on the wheel for the majority of the final minute of travel. Really makes me feel like Tesla was out to blame the driver from the get go. To be clear the driver is absolutely partially at fault, but my goodness autopilot sped up into the barrier in the final seconds — totally unexpected when the car…

> Don’t want to see autopilot disabled as a result of this, would rather Tesla use this to double down and apply new learnings.

I agree that Tesla obviously needs to be learning from this. But at this point in time, Autopilot needs to be turned off until Tesla can fix the fundamental flaws in the set of sensors on their cars. There is now strong evidence that Autopilot is dangerous, and there is still weak evidence that it is less dangerous than the alternative (i.e., a human driving).

I expect that the NTSB will eventually issue a safety recommendation that Autopilot not be used in its current form. I'm a bit surprised they didn't issue an urgent recommendation in the preliminary report, or even before.

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