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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

#91

Post by lawrenceyan »

ideamotor wrote: post #15
slaymaker1907 wrote: post #5

I always think it's weird how instead of just improving public transit, we've all become fixated on self driving vehicles. Good transit would mean most people don't need to operate a vehicle while having a plethora of other benefits like combating climate change and more efficient land use (if you live in a suburb, take note of the sheer amount land dedicated to parking; it's often more land than the store for retail…

To a programmer every problem looks like a software problem. Information technology tends to free ride on public goods, essentially profiting from commons without contributing to them. That’s the feedback loop that is lacking. The negative externality, if you will, that should be brought in. If, let’s say ubers and taxis paid a tax when they rode around without passengers and that tax specifically went to road upkeep…

Pretty easy to complain in your ivory tower when these engineers are actually trying to do something to fix the problems you’re talking about.

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

#92

Post by buffington »

justsomedood wrote: post #88
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…

> why even pay attention?

Tesla's Autopilot feature compels you to pay attention. If it doesn't detect your hands on the wheels applying slight pressure, the car will nag at you, first by flashing blue on the screen, then by sounding alarms, until it does feel slight pressure on the wheel, and if you ignore that, it'll slow the car to a stop.

> The whole reason to use autopilot is to interact less with the vehicle.

According to who? Tesla? I've yet to see any documentation saying what the point of Autopilot says. The official user manual for the feature doesn't even try to explain why the feature exists.

I've used the feature in my Tesla, and frankly, it's lane aware cruise control. That's it. It in no way allows you to do other stuff. If anything, I have to interact more with my car when I'm using Autopilot.

I also think there's more to this story than just an inattentive Tesla driver ignoring their Autopilot's warnings. Especially when it happened at 1:10AM on a stretch of highway that's straight and smooth, and likely had very few other vehicles.

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

#93

Post by beepbeepcabbage »

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…

This is a US problem, not a train problem.

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

#94

Post by pandaman »

jgwil2 wrote: post #82
josephcsible wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 requirement…

What good is a yard if nothing grows there because it's surrounded by high-rises blocking sun? And not sharing walls is of little comfort when you are adjunct to a 20 unit apartment where 4 units have a party every night and on the weekends - all 20 do. It's not like we have made up zoning just to piss off hipsters. Zoning came up as a solution to the problem of your externalities not stopping on your property line. The only way it goes away is another solution instead of I do what I want, sucks to be you.

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

#95

Post by woodruffw »

decafninja wrote: post #89
woodruffw wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pro…

> 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.

Statistically, he isn't. If drunks stabbed people on subways at the rate that drunks killed people with their cars, around 46 people would be stabbed on the US's subways each day. And that's killed with cars, not "permanently disabled or disfigured"; that rate is even higher.

The problem with the "psycho" example is that it just isn't that common. It's chiefly a perception, a statistically misaligned one, that's been ruthlessly propagated to support economic structures that benefit from as many Americans driving as much as possible. That isn't to say that it doesn't happen, but to use the drunk driving example again: we tolerate orders of magnitude more antisocial behavior on our roads than we do in our public transit systems.

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

#97

Post by ncmncm »

0xedd wrote: post #67
ncmncm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have statistics refuting them? You can go on YT and step through self-crashing videos frame by frame. The burden is on them to show it is safe before they turn it on.

Hah! I see propaganda has captured you nicely. Cancel culture cuisine; it's enough to claim someone is guilty to indict him. It's his responsibility to prove innocence! A tangent; Tesla did show their self driving is safe. Doesn't mean it has no bugs.

Must be a new definition of "safe": kills drivers, passengers, motorcyclists, people in other cars. Accelerates at concrete freeway barriers. Steers into cars parked off the road.

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

#98

Post by pandaman »

woodruffw wrote: post #95
decafninja wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

> 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. Statistically, he isn't. If drunks stabbed people on subways at the rate that drunks killed people with their cars, around 46 people would be stabbed on the US's subways each day. And that's killed with cars, not "permanently disabled or disfigured"; that rate is even higher. The p…

Could you explain your statistics a bit? The first link I've found[1] shows 50,930 fatalities in 2019 with estimated 19% involving drunk drivers. So 9676 fatalities per year. Let's assume drunk drivers always kill somebody and survive themselves i.e. no drunk driver ever died in a single car accident. This makes 27 fatalities caused by drunk drivers every day.

Did you mean that approximately twice as many people ride subway than drive in the US? I could not find numbers on subway ridership but considering only few cities have a subway at all it's very hard to believe but I am open to the data.

1. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/drunk-driving-s...

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

#99

Post by Schroedingersat »

ActorNightly wrote: post #12
Schroedingersat wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla should be liable by virtue of calling things 'autopilot' or 'full self driving' which aren't.

This is possibly the dumbest argument against Tesla one could make. From the origin of autopilot from its aviation history, its pretty clear that autopilot was not designed to prevent you from hitting things.

In aircraft or maritime it's a system you can activate and stop paying attention to the controls or do a task like navigation, eating, or going to the bathroom for timescales on the order of seconds to minutes.

Tesla's 'autopilot' system is cruise control but with more mental overhead when the human needs to react because the human is being hypnotised by lack of stimulus and has to keep a mental model of what the car is planning in their head.

And 'full self driving' is an automated way of making the driver as unprepared for novel stimulus as possible. "You have to sit here and do nothing, but react in milliseconds when I fuck up" is not a task a human can do.

Tesla know this and have known this since before they made the features available and gave them misleading names. So when the human inevitably doesn't react in time in a scenario where it is impossible for them to react in time, they are the ones responsible.

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

#100

Post by ncmncm »

skybrian wrote: post #90
ncmncm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> "(wholly-legal urban tunnel fraud aside)"

As I said. It is usually best to read what you reply to.

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