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Tesla on autopilot rear ends motorcycle on freeway, killing rider

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Re: Tesla on autopilot rear ends motorcycle on freeway, killing rider

#81

Post by mwint »

_hcuq wrote: post #51
majormajor wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it weird? I think there's two big things that explain why it's not weird: 1) How expensive and disruptive to build would "good transit" actually be? 2) How much do people appreciate more direct point-to-point transportation? This incident occured in a town of 51,000 people with a density of 1,700/sq mile, that looks like a suburb of Salt Lake City which itself has 200,000 people with a density of 1,800/sq mile. Wh…

So…… 25 sq miles. Let’s assume a 5 mile x 5 mile grid. Let’s put a bus route every half mile. That’s 20 bus routes. Let’s run a bus on each route every 15 minutes…. The buses run at an average speed of say 20 mph. So each bus takes 20 minutes to traverse the route in one direction. You would need 2 buses per route. That’s 40 buses. Let’s say it costs $100 per hour to run the bus. (Googled it). So that’s $4000/hr to r…

Where'd this $5000/car(/yr?) number come from? Total cost of ownership for a car is far less than that. You can only really get to $5k/year through very high depreciation, and people buying those kinds of cars won't be riding your busses anyway.

Also, $100/hr to run a bus is probably a fine operating cost number, but you do have to buy the bus (capitalized cost) and take the depreciation hit just like cars.

Re: Tesla on autopilot rear ends motorcycle on freeway, killing rider

#82

Post by jgwil2 »

josephcsible wrote: post #47
kbos87 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s weird and I unfortunately think public transit is in the beginning of a slow death spiral post-pandemic in the US. Reason 1: people in the US aren’t judging transit vs car ownership on the axes you mentioned. They largely don’t care about climate change and efficient land use (at least not enough to change their own habits.) They care about comfort, control over their own surroundings and mobility,…

By "efficient land use", do you mean that I shouldn't be allowed to have a yard of my own, and that I should have to share walls with my neighbors? If so, then "don’t care about" is an understatement; I'm actively against it.

Such a tedious strawman that somehow keeps getting rolled out every time transit and density come up here... no one is saying you "shouldn't be allowed to have a yard of my own," people are saying that you should have the right to build more densely on your property if you want to, which should have the side effect of creating more efficient land use and less expensive housing. It's about changing zoning requirements to give property owners more rights, not fewer.

Re: Tesla on autopilot rear ends motorcycle on freeway, killing rider

#83

Post by shepherdjerred »

ncmncm wrote: post #56
shepherdjerred wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously public transit is far less convenient, and not always an option depending on where you live.

Public transit in the US is drastically underfunded, in favor of massive subsidies for cars and arrangements requiring cars. Compare to much of Europe.

I totally agree, but the reality is that if you don't have a car then you won't be able to easily commute in most cities. I'd love for this to change, but a few individuals choosing to suffer by not having a car isn't going to help anything.

Re: Tesla on autopilot rear ends motorcycle on freeway, killing rider

#84

Post by mwint »

rvz wrote: post #11

Oh dear. It's getting really hard for anyone to defend this contraption. Perhaps that explains the silence from the Tesla autopilot crowd shocked by the news of this yet another collision from an unsafe piece of 'safety critical' software. Both Autopilot and FSD (Fools Self Driving) needs to be investigated urgently.

The "silence from the Tesla autopilot crowd" may be related to the fact that Tesla accident stories tend to be quietly corrected three months later. For example "Self-Driving Tesla runs into tree, kills occupants" turns into "Guy shows off and floors car into tree, car obeys"

Re: Tesla on autopilot rear ends motorcycle on freeway, killing rider

#85

Post by effingwewt »

sathomasga wrote: post #79

As someone who's more likely to cycle somewhere than to drive, I wish there was as much attention paid every time a human-piloted car did something like this. It happens much more frequently than most folks realize. I used to follow "bicycle" news stories in a news aggregation app, but had to stop because my timeline was filled with "bicyclist killed by driver" stories. There was almost always at least one every day.…

This is about a motorcycle, not a bicycle.

It was on a highway not a regular road to be shared with cyclists.

edit to add as I dont think it was clear- the tesla's system should have been able to detect the motorcycle as it was on the highway operating normally, so imo this makes it all the more egregious.

Re: Tesla on autopilot rear ends motorcycle on freeway, killing rider

#86

Post by foxes »

decafninja wrote: post #74
Panzer04 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"de facto homeless shelters"? wtf? Is that genuinely a concern in some places? Cars have an edge on transit because orders of magnitude more money is spent on the road system and on the vehicles than is spent on PT. Despite that, PT tends to be faster in cities, where it's simply not possible to jam more cars in (it turns out only carrying one person per car is a truly massive capacity constraint. Cars will probably…

Yes - it's a genuine concern in the US. In fact, looking at many of these public transit vs. car threads on HN, on the topic of safety, I feel transit advocates are not understanding the issue properly. Most people that dislike using public transit in the US are not afraid that the train or bus will derail or get into an accident. The odds of that happening are definitely tiny. What they're afraid of is some psycho o…

Every other country in the world can embrace efficient clean public transport, and then America can be a theocratic car filled wasteland filled with dangerously unstable individuals, and completely decayed social structure.

Re: Tesla on autopilot rear ends motorcycle on freeway, killing rider

#87

Post by cozos »

_hcuq wrote: post #51
majormajor wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it weird? I think there's two big things that explain why it's not weird: 1) How expensive and disruptive to build would "good transit" actually be? 2) How much do people appreciate more direct point-to-point transportation? This incident occured in a town of 51,000 people with a density of 1,700/sq mile, that looks like a suburb of Salt Lake City which itself has 200,000 people with a density of 1,800/sq mile. Wh…

So…… 25 sq miles. Let’s assume a 5 mile x 5 mile grid. Let’s put a bus route every half mile. That’s 20 bus routes. Let’s run a bus on each route every 15 minutes…. The buses run at an average speed of say 20 mph. So each bus takes 20 minutes to traverse the route in one direction. You would need 2 buses per route. That’s 40 buses. Let’s say it costs $100 per hour to run the bus. (Googled it). So that’s $4000/hr to r…

This analysis reeks of confirmation bias. You don't need one personal car for every 3 people if you were to comparing busses with self driving cars. You would have a fleet, just like you do with busses. Here is something posted a couple days ago:

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/19/1111765630/on-demand-shuttles...

15 minivans replaced 6 busses, at a cost of 1.6 million to 1.3 million per year - but with much better coverage than the busses.

Of course this equation will look very different in big cities where economies of scale from mass transit kick in， but hey, small cities need transit too.

Re: Tesla on autopilot rear ends motorcycle on freeway, killing rider

#88

Post by justsomedood »

credit_guy wrote: post #80

To me it seems there's more to this story. The crash happened at 1:10 am on a highway in Utah. I imagine there was no traffic at that time. Most likely there were only this motorcycle and the Tesla, and at most a few other cars over a good stretch of highway. When there's no traffic, motorcycles tend to go faster than cars. A Tesla on autopilot either respects the speed limit (factory setting), or it can be programme…

The speed limit where this occurred is 70mph. Most motorcyclists are at the speed limit. If the Tesla rear ended the motorcycle at 80mph (10mph difference) that is a life ending mistake.

As to how the driver didn't see the motorcycle, if the car is driving for you why even pay attention? Especially at night when there are so few other drivers. The whole reason to use autopilot is to interact less with the vehicle. I know telsa says you have to pay attention, but the point of the feature is not to.

Re: Tesla on autopilot rear ends motorcycle on freeway, killing rider

#89

Post by decafninja »

woodruffw wrote: post #72
ravenstine wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your ideas for improving public transit? Because the way I see it, public transit suffers from issues that are hard to overcome and are exacerbated by globalized societies. Public transit simply can't take you everywhere. Even when I e lived in areas with dense bus routes, how one would get to a stop was often a question. Buses are relatively slow and impede traffic, especially in larger cities. More trains…

> The only place where I have lived where this wasn't a problem was New Zealand, and that was 18 years ago, so I don't know if that's still the case. I always give up on public transit after seeing enough acts of human degradation and fights breaking out. Let's not forget the smell. You were supposed to describe public transit, not a rest stop on an Interstate Highway in the United States :-) But seriously: the thing…

The drunk guy about to T-bone you is more difficult to encounter in the first place than the drunk guy about to stab you on the subway.

I agree these are civic issues, not issues with public transportation. However I always get the impression that many ardent public transit advocates are the ones who are also resistant to cleaning up public transit so that it is more attractive.

Yes, let's definitely work towards providing mental health solutions, but let's also not let the psycho claim an entire subway car because "he has every right to be there" or "it's inhumane to forcibly remove him" and still expect the general public to delight in giving up their cars and take the subway instead.

Re: Tesla on autopilot rear ends motorcycle on freeway, killing rider

#90

Post by skybrian »

ncmncm wrote: post #63
skybrian wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem like all that many people are all that crazy about self-driving cars? It's a frequent topic of conversation because some companies have invested a lot of money in it. But people express fairly negative sentiments about it. Meanwhile, huge amounts of money is spent on improving mass transit. It's fairly conventional wisdom that it's a good thing. (The money doesn't seem to go very far though, compared…

Huge amounts are not (wholly-legal urban tunnel fraud aside) spent on public transit. Huge amounts are instead siphoned from public transit to shore up car makers' and suburb real estate profits.

Examples:

In California, $10 billion so far has been spent on high speed rail. The new bus terminal in SF was $2 billion, though admittedly that includes a skyscraper and a park. The Bart extension to Milpitas cost another $2 billion.

In Manhattan the first phase of the second avenue line cost $4.5 billion and the second phase will cost $6 billion.

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