6 ms·

Really not much additional info here aside from the number of warnings the driver had. Also, the standard "Tesla is 10x safer" metrics that get pulled out each

Really not much additional info here aside from the number of warnings the driver had. Also, the standard "Tesla is 10x safer" metrics that get pulled out each time a crash gets sensationalized. What I think they fail to address, especially in this case, is that the autopilot did something a human driver who was paying attention would never do. Autopilot does a great job of saving people from things even a wary driver would miss, much less a negligent one, but the fatal accidents that occur in statistics are not from people who are fully watching the road missing the fact that there's a concrete barrier with yellow safety markings directly in their path, and hitting it head on for no good reason (e.g. evasive action because of another driver, etc, oh a stupid last-minute "oh crap that's my exit"). I want autopilot to succeed, and I want Tesla (and Musk) to succeed, and for the sake of their public image they have to realize that this isn't an average accident statistic, a lapse in attention or evasive maneuvering. It's a car that seemingly plowed right into a concrete barrier while still under complete control. That's not a mistake a healthy human will make.

hedora 9y ago
> the autopilot did something a human driver who was paying attention would never do. Then how did the crushed barrier get crushed before the Tesla hit it? Clearly, the stretch of road is unsafe enough to trick humans drivers (and, clearly, Tesla should improve).
- andrewstuart2 9y ago
  I'm obviously not privy to the details of the prior crash, but I'm pretty sure any healthy human would not deliberately drive into the barrier. The most likely scenarios I can think of would be not paying attention and drifting into the barrier, attempting to avoid a car merging into the lane (and not paying enough attention), or being struck by another car and being forced into the barrier.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    At that particular point, what I see the most is people deciding that they either need to exit or not and abruptly crossing from one HOV lane to the other. Lots of crazy shit. So I'm not sure your scenarios have much relevance -- how many times have you driven through this intersection? I've been through it maybe a thousand times since it was built.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      I’ve seen people back up in the breakdown lane on the expressway because they missed their exit. But that was Beijing, and all drivers are hyper sensitive on the lookout for that kind of stuff.
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        On my first drive into Bucharest a guy drove on the wrong side of the divided highway to take a left into the lot of a building supplies company right in front of my car. Scared the crap out of me. https://www.google.com/maps/@44.436552,25.9597006,18z https://www.google.com/maps/@44.436552,25.9597006,18z
        paganel 9y ago
        Can confirm, have just driven for 2+ hours on the streets of Bucharest and there’s no way for an AI-like car to drive in here for more than 2 blocks without getting involved into an accident. Unless said car becomes sentient, but even in that case it would still have to “guess” some of the crazy stuff the other drivers on the road may be up to or to expect that a barely marked road-construction thingie will suddenly show up just in front of the vehicle while driving at 60 kph. And Bucharest has got nothing on a city like Istanbul.
        jacquesm 9y ago
        It's the only place where I got honked at by a car on the sidewalk while walking on the sidewalk, and when I didn't get out of the way fast enough he proceeded to attempt to nudge me with his car.
  - Robotbeat 9y ago
    I think the answer is that the path into the barrier looks just like an actual lane, and that this was enough confusion that a human driver apparently had made the same exact mistake a week earlier. https://imgur.com/a/iMY1x https://imgur.com/a/iMY1x https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/screen-shot-2018-03-27-at-7-51-49-pm.png https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/screen-sho...
    - 7dare 9y ago
      The lanes aren't very well indicated, but given how visible the divider is, I don't think either an autopilot or a driver should drive off. Reminds me of a scene in "La grande vadrouille" where a motorcyclist is killed on a mountain road because he was following the dotted line and the painter had gone to the side of the road to take a break. Also, that's an immense pothole!
      - eckza 9y ago
        > That’s an immense pothole! ... well you certainly aren’t from southeast Michigan, that’s for sure.
    - shambolicfroli 9y ago
      CalTrans doesn't diagonally stripe spaces like that? It would seem that they should.
      - DrScump 9y ago
        There has been a lot of repaving work on 101, so these may well not be the final markings.
        what_ever 9y ago
        I don't think that area has been repaved in a while.
    - praptak 9y ago
      This divider looks rather unforgiving. Is it common for dividers in US to be just plain concrete blocks without anything to prevent rapid deceleration?
  - DrScump 9y ago
    any healthy human would not deliberately drive into the barrier But plenty have driven negligently into barriers. The worst such crash I've ever seen was barely 2 miles from there, on northbound 85 near Fremont Ave. There is a soundwall that comes to a connection point where a wall segment is directly perpendicular to the freeway. For some reason, the guardrail had a gap there almost exactly the width of a vehicle. A few years ago, a vehicle veered off the right shoulder and perfectly threaded the gap, into the wall at full speed. It was compressed to maybe 5 feet long.
  - abalone 9y ago
    Prior crash was a DUI.[1] [1] http://abc7news.com/automotive/exclusive-i-team-investigates-why-caltrans-didnt-fix-safety-barrier-before-tesla-driver-died-there/3280399/ http://abc7news.com/automotive/exclusive-i-team-investigates...
- jonhendry18 9y ago
  Distraction, misjudged timing, sudden health problem, etc
- bobsil1 9y ago
  Previous driver was drunk.
- justin66 9y ago
  It's a somewhat easy accident to have in heavy traffic if the lanes aren't marked clearly and you don't see the barrier because of cars ahead of you. Not a factor in the Tesla crash (they had a clear line of sight) or in the original crash (which was a DUI).
leftistcensor03 9y ago
it's a mistake that healthy humans make all the time, which is why those crash barriers exist in the first place, and why that particular crash barrier was damaged by a previous crash.
- incadenza 9y ago
  You’re missing the point. The crucial fact according to OP is that the car did something that a fully aware driver would not ever do. It’s at least worth acknowledging that.
  - loeg 9y ago
    "Fully aware" drivers (true Scotsmen) as proposed here statistically do not exist, or at least do not compose the vast majority of drivers. So it is kind of a meaningless comparison to draw.
    - incadenza 9y ago
      It's not a True Scotsman in this context. The point is that humans tend to crash into things they're not fully aware of, short of self-harm. Either: A) The autopilot could not see a concrete barrier in its path. B) More likely, and as the story reports, it WAS aware of the danger but didn't do anything. Either case is at least worth discussing, no?
      - xapata 9y ago
        In which bucket would you put the possibility that the computer observed evidence of the barrier, but the evidence that there was no barrier -- the prior that barriers don't exist in lanes of traffic -- was too strong?
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        incadenza 9y ago
hourislate 9y ago
I thought the auto pilot warned the driver to take control of the vehicle or is that incorrect? There is probably a lot more we don't know and it would be premature to place the blame on the auto pilot and Tesla. This isn't a lvl 5 system. It still requires the drivers attention and that is something we need to consider ( he obviously didn't have his hands on the wheel).
- rgbrenner 9y ago
  Technically tesla's statement says he was warned at some point to take control during his drive. That could have been 5 seconds into his commute, or it could have been 5 seconds before he hit the barrier. He may have taken control at that time, and then reengaged it later. He may or may not have been warned to take control before hitting the barrier. Tesla's statement is not clear on this at all.
  - gibybo 9y ago
    >or it could have been 5 seconds before he hit the barrier. If that was the case, they would have said so. Their vagueness here is telling.
  - SomewhatLikely 9y ago
    The statement mentions "hands on warning" which just means you need to keep your hands on the wheel. That's very different than giving control back to the driver.
    - rgbrenner 9y ago
      Thank you.. you are correct. That’s an important detail I wrote incorrectly.
jiveturkey 9y ago
> human driver who was paying attention true. here’s the location (post #62) https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/model-x-crash-on-us-101-mountain-view-ca.111505/page-4 https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/model-x-crash-on-us-... but the average person in the US anyway is not a good driver. i very often see people get aurprised at the lane ending at that exact spot. they should put a rumble strip leading up to it. So, my question is, is it fair to compare AP to a human driver paying attention or is it more fair to compare it to an average driver. I mean that just for the sake of argument. In this specific case, NTSB or someone should ban AP. It is so obvious what’s about to happen there, an AP should do what a driver should do which is take the ramp whether it’s a wrong turn or not. So many a-holes try to squeeze in last second (oops) when they should just take the damn exit or miss the damn exit as the case may be. What AP did here is what a poor and panicked driver would do and that’s just not acceptable.
- xapata 9y ago
  Did they release information about the path the car took? It could just as well have simply gone down the median as if it were a lane of traffic.
colordrops 9y ago
But this wasn't a self driving vehicle. It isn't capable of dealing with all situations, and it warning the driver for 6 seconds to take control, which didn't happen.
- Kiro 9y ago
  No, it didn't warn at all. It warned prior to this, which was just put in the text to trick people into thinking it warned.
mercer 9y ago
> That's not a mistake a healthy human will make. Humans do exceedingly stupid things all the time because they stop paying attention, even momentarily (or subconsciously). We put big lights on the back of cars that light up when they brake. And yet, despite a driver looking direct at a huge object with two lights, that rapidly grows larger right in front of them, does not always prevent a collision. Or even a chain of collisions. I don't get on the road much, and yet even I've seen a ton of accidents that are baffling and can only have been the result of a driver not paying attention for a bit. I'm reminded of how in quite a few places removing signs and lights actually improved safety because it forced drivers to stay aware instead of 'driving on autopilot', so to speak. I think that's the real issue here. The more we outsource our attention to a machine, the more important it is that said machine does MUCH better than we humans do. Especially if a mistake can be deadly. But I wouldn't be surprised if, indeed, technically this accident could've happened just as easily by a non-autopilot car where the driver had a little 'micro-sleep', got distracted by something in his field of view, mistakenly thought he was on a lane and didn't notice the (let's be fair) ridiculously bad markers that were the only way to tell that part of the 'gray' stuff in front of him was in fact a wall of concrete. I mean, just look at the image: https://imgur.com/a/iMY1x https://imgur.com/a/iMY1x . Half of what makes the barrier stand out is the shadow! All that said I might sound more argumentative than I am. I do agree with most of your comment.
emiliobumachar 9y ago
"the autopilot did something a human driver who was paying attention would never do" "this isn't an average accident statistic, a lapse in attention or evasive maneuvering. " "That's not a mistake a healthy human will make." Almost every driver thinks they're significantly better than average. Few are. If a human driver's lapse of attention causes a similar crash, how much less of a tragedy is it just because we can less ambiguously blame the victim? My opinion is that the statistics compare just fine.
- airstrike 9y ago
  > Almost every driver thinks they’re significantly better than average. Few are. Actually, about half of drivers are better than average.
  - r00fus 9y ago
    It's easy to provide a counterpoint if you ignore words (significantly). Few people are significantly above average.
  - ricardobeat 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median
    - airstrike 9y ago
      Hence “about” and not exactly half, unless you can prove some weird distribution for drivers’ abilities. Go on, I’ll wait.
rco8786 9y ago
I’m not sure I agree. Humans run into highly visible barriers all the time.
mrb 9y ago
«the autopilot did something a human driver who was paying attention would never do» I'm sure that out of the 1.25 million annual automobile-related deaths, plenty of drivers were paying attention and still did stupid things similar to this accident.
- dlp211 9y ago
  Using global statistics greatly skews your argument. While all these deaths are tragic, many of them could be prevented through law and regulation of human drivers.
corey_moncure 9y ago
>That's not a mistake a healthy human will make. This statement is meaningless circular logic. You can handwave away any incident with a human driver by saying he wasn't "healthy". A human pilot has intentionally driven an airplane full of passengers into the ground with full control because he wanted to kill himself. The airline believed he was "healthy".
OrganicMSG 9y ago
I want electric cars to succeed as I am am long bored of breathing in vehicle fumes. Automated driving is cool sci-fi tech, but holds nowhere near the same sense of necessity, as far as I am concerned. So, I thought it wasn't all that clever in the first place to try and marry the risks of getting electric cars into the market with the risks of telling the extremely wealthy that they didn't need to hold the damn steering wheel.

hedora 9y ago

> the autopilot did something a human driver who was paying attention would never do. Then how did the crushed barrier get crushed before the Tesla hit it? Clearly, the stretch of road is unsafe enough to trick humans drivers (and, clearly, Tesla should improve).

andrewstuart2 9y ago
I'm obviously not privy to the details of the prior crash, but I'm pretty sure any healthy human would not deliberately drive into the barrier. The most likely scenarios I can think of would be not paying attention and drifting into the barrier, attempting to avoid a car merging into the lane (and not paying enough attention), or being struck by another car and being forced into the barrier.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  At that particular point, what I see the most is people deciding that they either need to exit or not and abruptly crossing from one HOV lane to the other. Lots of crazy shit. So I'm not sure your scenarios have much relevance -- how many times have you driven through this intersection? I've been through it maybe a thousand times since it was built.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    I’ve seen people back up in the breakdown lane on the expressway because they missed their exit. But that was Beijing, and all drivers are hyper sensitive on the lookout for that kind of stuff.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      On my first drive into Bucharest a guy drove on the wrong side of the divided highway to take a left into the lot of a building supplies company right in front of my car. Scared the crap out of me. https://www.google.com/maps/@44.436552,25.9597006,18z https://www.google.com/maps/@44.436552,25.9597006,18z
      - paganel 9y ago
        Can confirm, have just driven for 2+ hours on the streets of Bucharest and there’s no way for an AI-like car to drive in here for more than 2 blocks without getting involved into an accident. Unless said car becomes sentient, but even in that case it would still have to “guess” some of the crazy stuff the other drivers on the road may be up to or to expect that a barely marked road-construction thingie will suddenly show up just in front of the vehicle while driving at 60 kph. And Bucharest has got nothing on a city like Istanbul.
        jacquesm 9y ago
        It's the only place where I got honked at by a car on the sidewalk while walking on the sidewalk, and when I didn't get out of the way fast enough he proceeded to attempt to nudge me with his car.
- Robotbeat 9y ago
  I think the answer is that the path into the barrier looks just like an actual lane, and that this was enough confusion that a human driver apparently had made the same exact mistake a week earlier. https://imgur.com/a/iMY1x https://imgur.com/a/iMY1x https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/screen-shot-2018-03-27-at-7-51-49-pm.png https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/screen-sho...
  - 7dare 9y ago
    The lanes aren't very well indicated, but given how visible the divider is, I don't think either an autopilot or a driver should drive off. Reminds me of a scene in "La grande vadrouille" where a motorcyclist is killed on a mountain road because he was following the dotted line and the painter had gone to the side of the road to take a break. Also, that's an immense pothole!
    - eckza 9y ago
      > That’s an immense pothole! ... well you certainly aren’t from southeast Michigan, that’s for sure.
  - shambolicfroli 9y ago
    CalTrans doesn't diagonally stripe spaces like that? It would seem that they should.
    - DrScump 9y ago
      There has been a lot of repaving work on 101, so these may well not be the final markings.
      - what_ever 9y ago
        I don't think that area has been repaved in a while.
  - praptak 9y ago
    This divider looks rather unforgiving. Is it common for dividers in US to be just plain concrete blocks without anything to prevent rapid deceleration?
- DrScump 9y ago
  any healthy human would not deliberately drive into the barrier But plenty have driven negligently into barriers. The worst such crash I've ever seen was barely 2 miles from there, on northbound 85 near Fremont Ave. There is a soundwall that comes to a connection point where a wall segment is directly perpendicular to the freeway. For some reason, the guardrail had a gap there almost exactly the width of a vehicle. A few years ago, a vehicle veered off the right shoulder and perfectly threaded the gap, into the wall at full speed. It was compressed to maybe 5 feet long.
- abalone 9y ago
  Prior crash was a DUI.[1] [1] http://abc7news.com/automotive/exclusive-i-team-investigates-why-caltrans-didnt-fix-safety-barrier-before-tesla-driver-died-there/3280399/ http://abc7news.com/automotive/exclusive-i-team-investigates...
jonhendry18 9y ago
Distraction, misjudged timing, sudden health problem, etc
bobsil1 9y ago
Previous driver was drunk.
justin66 9y ago
It's a somewhat easy accident to have in heavy traffic if the lanes aren't marked clearly and you don't see the barrier because of cars ahead of you. Not a factor in the Tesla crash (they had a clear line of sight) or in the original crash (which was a DUI).

leftistcensor03 9y ago

it's a mistake that healthy humans make all the time, which is why those crash barriers exist in the first place, and why that particular crash barrier was damaged by a previous crash.

incadenza 9y ago
You’re missing the point. The crucial fact according to OP is that the car did something that a fully aware driver would not ever do. It’s at least worth acknowledging that.
- loeg 9y ago
  "Fully aware" drivers (true Scotsmen) as proposed here statistically do not exist, or at least do not compose the vast majority of drivers. So it is kind of a meaningless comparison to draw.
  - incadenza 9y ago
    It's not a True Scotsman in this context. The point is that humans tend to crash into things they're not fully aware of, short of self-harm. Either: A) The autopilot could not see a concrete barrier in its path. B) More likely, and as the story reports, it WAS aware of the danger but didn't do anything. Either case is at least worth discussing, no?
    - xapata 9y ago
      In which bucket would you put the possibility that the computer observed evidence of the barrier, but the evidence that there was no barrier -- the prior that barriers don't exist in lanes of traffic -- was too strong?
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - incadenza 9y ago

hourislate 9y ago

I thought the auto pilot warned the driver to take control of the vehicle or is that incorrect? There is probably a lot more we don't know and it would be premature to place the blame on the auto pilot and Tesla. This isn't a lvl 5 system. It still requires the drivers attention and that is something we need to consider ( he obviously didn't have his hands on the wheel).

rgbrenner 9y ago
Technically tesla's statement says he was warned at some point to take control during his drive. That could have been 5 seconds into his commute, or it could have been 5 seconds before he hit the barrier. He may have taken control at that time, and then reengaged it later. He may or may not have been warned to take control before hitting the barrier. Tesla's statement is not clear on this at all.
- gibybo 9y ago
  >or it could have been 5 seconds before he hit the barrier. If that was the case, they would have said so. Their vagueness here is telling.
- SomewhatLikely 9y ago
  The statement mentions "hands on warning" which just means you need to keep your hands on the wheel. That's very different than giving control back to the driver.
  - rgbrenner 9y ago
    Thank you.. you are correct. That’s an important detail I wrote incorrectly.

jiveturkey 9y ago

> human driver who was paying attention true. here’s the location (post #62) https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/model-x-crash-on-us-101-mountain-view-ca.111505/page-4 https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/model-x-crash-on-us-... but the average person in the US anyway is not a good driver. i very often see people get aurprised at the lane ending at that exact spot. they should put a rumble strip leading up to it. So, my question is, is it fair to compare AP to a human driver paying attention or is it more fair to compare it to an average driver. I mean that just for the sake of argument. In this specific case, NTSB or someone should ban AP. It is so obvious what’s about to happen there, an AP should do what a driver should do which is take the ramp whether it’s a wrong turn or not. So many a-holes try to squeeze in last second (oops) when they should just take the damn exit or miss the damn exit as the case may be. What AP did here is what a poor and panicked driver would do and that’s just not acceptable.

xapata 9y ago
Did they release information about the path the car took? It could just as well have simply gone down the median as if it were a lane of traffic.

colordrops 9y ago

But this wasn't a self driving vehicle. It isn't capable of dealing with all situations, and it warning the driver for 6 seconds to take control, which didn't happen.

Kiro 9y ago
No, it didn't warn at all. It warned prior to this, which was just put in the text to trick people into thinking it warned.

mercer 9y ago

> That's not a mistake a healthy human will make. Humans do exceedingly stupid things all the time because they stop paying attention, even momentarily (or subconsciously). We put big lights on the back of cars that light up when they brake. And yet, despite a driver looking direct at a huge object with two lights, that rapidly grows larger right in front of them, does not always prevent a collision. Or even a chain of collisions. I don't get on the road much, and yet even I've seen a ton of accidents that are baffling and can only have been the result of a driver not paying attention for a bit. I'm reminded of how in quite a few places removing signs and lights actually improved safety because it forced drivers to stay aware instead of 'driving on autopilot', so to speak. I think that's the real issue here. The more we outsource our attention to a machine, the more important it is that said machine does MUCH better than we humans do. Especially if a mistake can be deadly. But I wouldn't be surprised if, indeed, technically this accident could've happened just as easily by a non-autopilot car where the driver had a little 'micro-sleep', got distracted by something in his field of view, mistakenly thought he was on a lane and didn't notice the (let's be fair) ridiculously bad markers that were the only way to tell that part of the 'gray' stuff in front of him was in fact a wall of concrete. I mean, just look at the image: https://imgur.com/a/iMY1x https://imgur.com/a/iMY1x . Half of what makes the barrier stand out is the shadow! All that said I might sound more argumentative than I am. I do agree with most of your comment.

emiliobumachar 9y ago

"the autopilot did something a human driver who was paying attention would never do" "this isn't an average accident statistic, a lapse in attention or evasive maneuvering. " "That's not a mistake a healthy human will make." Almost every driver thinks they're significantly better than average. Few are. If a human driver's lapse of attention causes a similar crash, how much less of a tragedy is it just because we can less ambiguously blame the victim? My opinion is that the statistics compare just fine.

airstrike 9y ago
> Almost every driver thinks they’re significantly better than average. Few are. Actually, about half of drivers are better than average.
- r00fus 9y ago
  It's easy to provide a counterpoint if you ignore words (significantly). Few people are significantly above average.
- ricardobeat 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median
  - airstrike 9y ago
    Hence “about” and not exactly half, unless you can prove some weird distribution for drivers’ abilities. Go on, I’ll wait.

rco8786 9y ago

I’m not sure I agree. Humans run into highly visible barriers all the time.

mrb 9y ago

«the autopilot did something a human driver who was paying attention would never do» I'm sure that out of the 1.25 million annual automobile-related deaths, plenty of drivers were paying attention and still did stupid things similar to this accident.

dlp211 9y ago
Using global statistics greatly skews your argument. While all these deaths are tragic, many of them could be prevented through law and regulation of human drivers.

corey_moncure 9y ago

>That's not a mistake a healthy human will make. This statement is meaningless circular logic. You can handwave away any incident with a human driver by saying he wasn't "healthy". A human pilot has intentionally driven an airplane full of passengers into the ground with full control because he wanted to kill himself. The airline believed he was "healthy".

OrganicMSG 9y ago

I want electric cars to succeed as I am am long bored of breathing in vehicle fumes. Automated driving is cool sci-fi tech, but holds nowhere near the same sense of necessity, as far as I am concerned. So, I thought it wasn't all that clever in the first place to try and marry the risks of getting electric cars into the market with the risks of telling the extremely wealthy that they didn't need to hold the damn steering wheel.