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This isn't great news for Tesla. This 30 second video also recently surfaced where someone reproduced the fatal accident involving autopilot from this week: ht

This isn't great news for Tesla. This 30 second video also recently surfaced where someone reproduced the fatal accident involving autopilot from this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QCF8tVqM3I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QCF8tVqM3I This could also be bad for Tesla if this is what occurred. Interestingly in this video the chevron lines exist, something people have been claiming would have averted the accident, also interesting that no warning alarm sounded at any stage.

saudioger 9y ago
Holy shit, not sure I would have been so interested in proving the problem that I would have taken my hands off the wheel like that. I can really see why Tesla would try to deny this so hard, seeing it happen yourself is frightening.
- oska 9y ago
  What evidence have you seen of Tesla ‘trying to deny this so hard’? I've read both of their press releases on the incident [1] [2] and I didn't see any attempts at denial in them. [1] https://www.tesla.com/es_ES/blog/what-we-know-about-last-weeks-accident https://www.tesla.com/es_ES/blog/what-we-know-about-last-wee... [2] https://www.tesla.com/es_ES/blog/update-last-week%E2%80%99s-accident https://www.tesla.com/es_ES/blog/update-last-week%E2%80%99s-...
  - sgustard 9y ago
    "Our data shows that Tesla owners have driven this same stretch of highway [thousands of times with no trouble]" reads as a denial, implying the crash was a one-off non-reproducible fluke, which the video certainly disproves.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    With the advent of this video I'm expecting Telsa to disable Autopilot across the entire fleet within another couple of hours. Anything less would be denial and warrant some head honcho at some regulator with teeth, and probably the FBI, turn up at Musk's house and drag him away. From your second link, in Tesla's own words: "The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken." What they didn't write is that the car also had an unobstructed view of the crash attenuator. Stop calling Autopilot. It's adaptive cruise control, so call it that.
  - epai 9y ago
    From the article: “Our data shows that Tesla owners have driven this same stretch of highway with Autopilot engaged roughly 85,000 times since Autopilot was first rolled out in 2015 and roughly 20,000 times since just the beginning of the year, and there has never been an accident that we know of. There are over 200 successful Autopilot trips per day on this exact stretch of road.” It seems like Tesla is trying to explain-away that particular incident as a one-off statistical outlier, and not the fault of the autopilot system. Appealing to statistics like that seems like an attempt to deny responsibility to me.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      That rationalization actually makes it _worse_ for me; it suggests they have no idea why this happened. But unless the person doing the video faked it, there's no question what happened: the car is driving down I-94 and veers out of its lane towards a concrete median until it's stopped by the operator.
  - simion314 9y ago
    They did not denied but they just don' tell us what we wanted to know, they did not tell us if the car tried to stop, if it detected an obstacle, if it actually called the alarm in that moment or minutes before, they just said aonlyu what the facts that are not damming for them.
MBCook 9y ago
It looks like it’s following the strong lane marker that ends up being the left-hand part of the marked out space in front of the barrier. I wonder if having a good line on the right-hand side of that space would help. That said, someone purposefully doing this and stopping in the middle of the highway stupidly dangerous.
- userbinator 9y ago
  Yes, it looks like it completely ignored the right lane marker and just focused on the left one, something a human would be unlikely to do. That said, someone purposefully doing this and stopping in the middle of the highway stupidly dangerous. As the saying goes, "it had to be done" --- to show the defect, before someone else gets killed, and the driver was clearly paying attention here. It stopped pointed right at the divider, a position no car would normally be in anyway, and there weren't many other cars around.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    Note that human-driven cars have frequent accidents in the Mountain View location, so I wouldn't assume that you understand why humans do or don't have problems here.
  - testplzignore 9y ago
    If I was driving on that stretch of highway, I'd be pretty confused by the line markings. I wouldn't crash into the barrier, but I might drift towards it a bit. The lack of a solid white line on the right side of the chevrons is dangerous and inexplicable. That said, self-driving cars have to be able to handle poor markings like this.
    - jcranmer 9y ago
      There is a solid white line on the right side, it's just faded. The chevrons are quite clear, however, so it's pretty damning that the car ignores the indication that it's cruising along a not-a-lane.
tristanj 9y ago
Note: This isn't at the same location as last week's accident. Last week's accident was in Mountain View, CA; while this one looks like it's in Lake Station, Indiana. Edit: it's in Chicago not Indiana, see replies
- Someone1234 9y ago
  Indeed. This one also has chevron markings, which people were pointing to the lack of as a partial cause of the other accident. This occurring in multiple locations isn't a comfort, it means the issue is more widespread than a single location.
- jcranmer 9y ago
  No, it's the 90/94 split on the Dan Ryan in Chicago: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.7763111,-87.6292446,3a,51.6y,148.26h,86.84t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sY2xCRS3ka-6fPKv9SGQJuw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@41.7763111,-87.6292446,3a,51.6y...
  - Symbiote 9y ago
    Those lane markins are awful. Ordinary paint, and worn out. Compare some from the UK. Bumpy paint, so the wheels vibrate and so they show up in the wet. Red reflectors, and barriers that would push the car back onto the road rather than into the bridge support. https://goo.gl/maps/TUf1xzLUN5N2 https://goo.gl/maps/TUf1xzLUN5N2 This is normal, though they're aren't many roads like this within cities, so there's usually space for a long, grassy strip.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      I have never in my entire life been more terrified than when I drove a car from Edinburgh to Elgin; there is nobody in the world who will ever convince me that UK roads are safer than those in the US. I don't understand how every driver in the UK isn't already dead.
      - Tomte 9y ago
Mtz1974 9y ago
I guess that they should add some unit tests to their vision stack.
berberous 9y ago
"also interesting that no warning alarm sounded at any stage." At 19 seconds, you can see that the dashboard says to put hands on the wheel. Does that not trigger an audible alarm by default in a Tesla?
- maratd 9y ago
  > Does that not trigger an audible alarm by default in a Tesla No. That's a standard warning that triggers every few minutes if the car can't sense your hands on the wheel. If you don't place your hands on the wheel at that point, then there will be an audible alarm. If you ignore that, the car will slowly reduce speed and come to a halt.
  - nnf 9y ago
    > every few minutes *every few seconds (12 seconds, I believe)
    - maratd 9y ago
      It's definitely every few minutes. I can attest to that from personal experience. Alternatively, you can just keep your hands on the wheel and then the warning doesn't come up.
- ec109685 9y ago
  Not unless you ignore it, then it will beep, then flash red. I think it doesn’t make an audible sound initially so it proves you are paying attention the whole time rather than only when it beeps at you.
slg 9y ago
This video is much more important than anything that was mentioned in the posted article. There are just as many questions about the numerous variables involved in the IIHS study as there are in Tesla's fudged statistics that they always cite. However there is little argument with that video. At some point there really needs to be a legal discussion about whether Tesla's argument that the driver must always be alert and responsible for the car is a realistic standard in which to hold people when semi-autonomous systems are engaged.
- buvanshak 9y ago
  > At some point there really needs to be a legal discussion about whether Tesla's argument that the driver must always be alert and responsible for the car is a realistic standard This should have been done before these things were ever allowed to put on roads. Zuck is right. We naively trust the world at large to work for our benefit automatically. We truly are "dumb fucks".
- emodendroket 9y ago
  > At some point there really needs to be a legal discussion about whether Tesla's argument that the driver must always be alert and responsible for the car is a realistic standard in which to hold people when semi-autonomous systems are engaged. It seems completely predictable that it wouldn't be, especially when they call it "autopilot."
  - slg 9y ago
    I have addressed this elsewhere in this thread, so let me just copy and paste that comment. >To be fair this is mostly a problem with the general public's understanding of the term autopilot and not with the actual systems that have used that name before. Aeronautical autopilots would probably only be classified as level 1 or maybe level 2 [autonomy] when that term was first coined and used to describe them. Even now I am not sure if we would classify the average autopilots you find on a commercial airliner as being fully at level 4. I don't think Tesla's naming it autopilot should have any impact on any legal discussions. I am not sure the driver should be responsible for everything that happens to the car while autopilot is engaged. However I think it is a completely fair and reasonable expectation that a driver understands what autopilot is capable of doing before they engage it. I don't think Tesla (at least through their marketing, I have heard some questionable things about their salespeople) has been misleading about that in any way. I don't have a lot of faith in people handling a Tesla responsibly if the only thing they know about autopilot is that it is named autopilot.
jijojv 9y ago
OMG this is exactly how it happened in the CA crash...
creato 9y ago
I want to know if the car braked automatically, or the driver had to brake to avoid colliding with the barrier. Also, the warning to put hands on the wheel was a joke. It's incredibly subtle and would only be noticed by someone looking for it, which is probably not the people that most need to respond to the warning.
- jijojv 9y ago
  That's not a crash warning at all. That is the usual warning ~ every minute to jiggle the wheel if you don't hold the wheel firmly if it can't detect you holding it.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  > I want to know if the car braked automatically, or the driver had to brake to avoid colliding with the barrier. You can see from the dashboard icons that he disengaged the Autopilot (by taking control). If it had detected an imminent crash it would have made warning sounds.
- nnf 9y ago
  The initial message that pops up is somewhat easy to miss, but the white flashing at the edges of the instrument panel gets my attention every time. It’s effective enough that I’ve never received the audible alert that comes next. (I don’t use my phone while driving, so my experience is based on looking at the road. Maybe it’s easier to miss when looking downward rather than forward.)
EGreg 9y ago
Hate to say it Tesla but you ain't ready for primetime. Neither is Uber. Waymo is on a whole other level. But I really would love to see more collaboration rather than competition in this area where safety is critical. Pardon the pun - why does everyone need to reinvent the wheel? And also encumber each other with patents? Open source beats proprietary competitive stuff like this.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Well, why would they do that unless the regulatory authorities made them? Is Waymo really "there"? It seems like everywhere I turn I'm seeing things that suggest that all of this technology has been hyped far beyond its actual capabilities.
  - rtpg 9y ago
    According to a new York times article recently, Waymos vehicles are currently driving on average 5600 miles between user intervention. For Uber this number was 13 5600 miles starts becoming "I need to use the wheel only 4 times a year" territory.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - JKCalhoun 9y ago
      > 5600 miles starts becoming "I need to use the wheel only 4 times a year" territory. It sounds like you're saying I will very likely die 4 times a year. If anything, perhaps the better performing algorithms will lead to more complacency (inattention) on the part of the driver... Sort of a Catch-22? (Or is there a better analogy I'm not thinking of.) Call me a Luddite, but I think I would prefer to steer the car myself, thank you. When someone says, self-driving car, I assume they mean a taxi, bus or train: all well-proven technologies.
      - smnrchrds 9y ago
        Are all 4 interventions safety-critical? They may simply be a case of the car having trouble finding the way out of a parking lot for example.
userbinator 9y ago
A human sees signs at 7s and 24s and the (admittedly not very clear) split of the lane at 27s as well as the yellow sign in the distance indicating the divider, while the autopilot sees a solid white line on the left and continues following it. It probably would've been fine if there was another white line at the split, like this (marked in red here): https://files.catbox.moe/10p2hh.JPG https://files.catbox.moe/10p2hh.JPG
- tptacek 9y ago
  There is another white line at the split, following the trajectory you've drawn. At the junction of the two lines, it's badly faded, but you can see at :32 and better when he looks up after :34 that the line is there, it's just not as freshly painted. That's not an unusual road condition at all; also: you'd think there'd be some logic reconciling the line it thinks it has to follow with the fact that an entire lane of traffic on the Ryan (the left-most I-94 lane) doesn't abruptly end.
  - jcranmer 9y ago
    The lane divider on the right is also quite visible; considering that its internal maps should tell it the road has a left exit, I'd expect that it should be able to guess that it should be holding to the right edge instead of the left edge of the lane. This does bring up a theory: the lane keeping is biased towards holding itself to the left edge of lanes, on the basis that most exits are right exits and therefore the right edge will tend to diverge a ways before making a new lane. I'm curious how it would handle the split at the mixing bowl in Springfield, VA: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.7735345,-77.1816237,3a,19.8y,25.05h,85.97t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1snKnSBVTQcos_8rxxVdvgCA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@38.7735345,-77.1816237,3a,19.8y... (functionally a left exit, although signed as if it were a right exit). The solid white line doesn't actually denote any lane exit boundaries there...
matte_black 9y ago
Christ, this video alone has eliminated any desire I may have had in getting a Tesla once and for all. For me, the one defining feature was self driving capability, but now I see it can’t even do that very safely.
- buvanshak 9y ago
  Yep. That was scary. You can feel the panic. And even after prompt intervention, that car came pretty close to the median!
jtchang 9y ago
This about as good a bug report as you can file. Can't wait to see Tesla close the issue in Jira with a "Cannot reproduce."
tbabb 9y ago
Wow, that video is pretty damning. (a) Even though the driver was getting a warning to put his hands on the wheel, the car should NOT continue driving forward and piloting itself at all with no driver response and insufficient certainty to continue navigating itself. (b) There was a very obvious hard barrier right in front of the car. Why didn't the collision avoidance detect it and halt the car? (c) The car was clearly "pulled" to the left by the bright exit lane stripe and missing highway-side stripe. Simply following stripes seems an absurdly primitive and unreliable technique to me. The fact that the car could be "distracted" this way suggests to me that it isn't getting (or making good use of) a lot of information that should be available to it-- like the behavior of other traffic, the presence of other obstacles and roadside geometry (like the ignored barrier, which was on a collision path), the trajectory on previous trips (and any conclusions drawn then under better conditions), the road sign which indicated a fork (and which was also itself on a direct collision path), the crosswise striping in between the two forks which the car was driving over, and the striping on the other edge of the lane, and the lanes beyond, which followed the correct trajectory. Each of those things is a significant clue as to the real path of the lane, and are all machine-detectable and processable pieces of information. Even with nontrivial uncertainty about each of them, the totality of information, IMO, should be more than enough to clearly discern the correct lane, especially if efficiently used-- Kalman filter-like information synthesis can take a lot of very uncertain information and synthesize a very certain picture. Instead the machine ignored the holistic picture and "target fixated" on the stripe. This apparently has a disappointingly long way to go before it is a reliable system.
- valuearb 9y ago
  You don’t understand how these systems work. The optical/radar combo can’t see stationary objects well when the car is going more than 30 MPH, it’s a sea of false positives. This is true of every self driving system on production cars today, 3D Lidar might address it but that’s up to $50K a car.
  - bipson 9y ago
    There is no production car with "self driving system" available right now. There are just "assistants", and they can't and should not drive on their own.
chaboud 9y ago
I think that the S and X have three forward-looking cameras center-mounted. Without a binocular baseline with which to establish distance, ranging of on-center obstructions could be difficult. Even if an edge is visible, the frame-to-frame variarion is low, especially for a black rubber sheet at night. I'd also be curious about the radar absorbsion of that rubber impact barrier. This, in part, is why Musk's assertion that this hardware would be sufficient for level 4 autonomy was so ridiculous. It really wasn't the kind of lanuage that a responsible engineer would use.
- mdekkers 9y ago
  I think that the S and X have three forward-looking cameras center-mounted. And I think that given Tesla's known propensity of logging _everything_, they would ave video footage of those camera's saved somewhere. I wonder if this is submitted as evidence, so we can understand what the car "saw" and "understood", both from optical as well as non-optical sensors...
lzaaa 9y ago
Weird. youtube-dl will not download this video. Can anyone else confirm?
- akoumis 9y ago
  Works for me
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  That was also the first thing I thought of. Worked at my end. Ping me if you want a copy, email in my profile.
Tomminn 9y ago
That video is damning-- no doubt. The Tesla should recognize the big barrier and stop or adjust lane well in advance. But what is equally damning is that I can't tell that the Tesla has done anything wrong until it's moments away from hitting that barrier. Who the hell decided that was a sensible way to mark the road? I would strongly prefer no markings to that confidence-inducing single white line, which I have been trained to through years of driving to stay sensibly adjacent to, and which will lead me like a lemming to my death.

saudioger 9y ago

Holy shit, not sure I would have been so interested in proving the problem that I would have taken my hands off the wheel like that. I can really see why Tesla would try to deny this so hard, seeing it happen yourself is frightening.

oska 9y ago
What evidence have you seen of Tesla ‘trying to deny this so hard’? I've read both of their press releases on the incident [1] [2] and I didn't see any attempts at denial in them. [1] https://www.tesla.com/es_ES/blog/what-we-know-about-last-weeks-accident https://www.tesla.com/es_ES/blog/what-we-know-about-last-wee... [2] https://www.tesla.com/es_ES/blog/update-last-week%E2%80%99s-accident https://www.tesla.com/es_ES/blog/update-last-week%E2%80%99s-...
- sgustard 9y ago
  "Our data shows that Tesla owners have driven this same stretch of highway [thousands of times with no trouble]" reads as a denial, implying the crash was a one-off non-reproducible fluke, which the video certainly disproves.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  With the advent of this video I'm expecting Telsa to disable Autopilot across the entire fleet within another couple of hours. Anything less would be denial and warrant some head honcho at some regulator with teeth, and probably the FBI, turn up at Musk's house and drag him away. From your second link, in Tesla's own words: "The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken." What they didn't write is that the car also had an unobstructed view of the crash attenuator. Stop calling Autopilot. It's adaptive cruise control, so call it that.
- epai 9y ago
  From the article: “Our data shows that Tesla owners have driven this same stretch of highway with Autopilot engaged roughly 85,000 times since Autopilot was first rolled out in 2015 and roughly 20,000 times since just the beginning of the year, and there has never been an accident that we know of. There are over 200 successful Autopilot trips per day on this exact stretch of road.” It seems like Tesla is trying to explain-away that particular incident as a one-off statistical outlier, and not the fault of the autopilot system. Appealing to statistics like that seems like an attempt to deny responsibility to me.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    That rationalization actually makes it _worse_ for me; it suggests they have no idea why this happened. But unless the person doing the video faked it, there's no question what happened: the car is driving down I-94 and veers out of its lane towards a concrete median until it's stopped by the operator.
- simion314 9y ago
  They did not denied but they just don' tell us what we wanted to know, they did not tell us if the car tried to stop, if it detected an obstacle, if it actually called the alarm in that moment or minutes before, they just said aonlyu what the facts that are not damming for them.

MBCook 9y ago

It looks like it’s following the strong lane marker that ends up being the left-hand part of the marked out space in front of the barrier. I wonder if having a good line on the right-hand side of that space would help. That said, someone purposefully doing this and stopping in the middle of the highway stupidly dangerous.

userbinator 9y ago
Yes, it looks like it completely ignored the right lane marker and just focused on the left one, something a human would be unlikely to do. That said, someone purposefully doing this and stopping in the middle of the highway stupidly dangerous. As the saying goes, "it had to be done" --- to show the defect, before someone else gets killed, and the driver was clearly paying attention here. It stopped pointed right at the divider, a position no car would normally be in anyway, and there weren't many other cars around.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Note that human-driven cars have frequent accidents in the Mountain View location, so I wouldn't assume that you understand why humans do or don't have problems here.
- testplzignore 9y ago
  If I was driving on that stretch of highway, I'd be pretty confused by the line markings. I wouldn't crash into the barrier, but I might drift towards it a bit. The lack of a solid white line on the right side of the chevrons is dangerous and inexplicable. That said, self-driving cars have to be able to handle poor markings like this.
  - jcranmer 9y ago
    There is a solid white line on the right side, it's just faded. The chevrons are quite clear, however, so it's pretty damning that the car ignores the indication that it's cruising along a not-a-lane.

tristanj 9y ago

Note: This isn't at the same location as last week's accident. Last week's accident was in Mountain View, CA; while this one looks like it's in Lake Station, Indiana. Edit: it's in Chicago not Indiana, see replies

Someone1234 9y ago
Indeed. This one also has chevron markings, which people were pointing to the lack of as a partial cause of the other accident. This occurring in multiple locations isn't a comfort, it means the issue is more widespread than a single location.
jcranmer 9y ago
No, it's the 90/94 split on the Dan Ryan in Chicago: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.7763111,-87.6292446,3a,51.6y,148.26h,86.84t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sY2xCRS3ka-6fPKv9SGQJuw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@41.7763111,-87.6292446,3a,51.6y...
- Symbiote 9y ago
  Those lane markins are awful. Ordinary paint, and worn out. Compare some from the UK. Bumpy paint, so the wheels vibrate and so they show up in the wet. Red reflectors, and barriers that would push the car back onto the road rather than into the bridge support. https://goo.gl/maps/TUf1xzLUN5N2 https://goo.gl/maps/TUf1xzLUN5N2 This is normal, though they're aren't many roads like this within cities, so there's usually space for a long, grassy strip.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    I have never in my entire life been more terrified than when I drove a car from Edinburgh to Elgin; there is nobody in the world who will ever convince me that UK roads are safer than those in the US. I don't understand how every driver in the UK isn't already dead.
    - Tomte 9y ago

Mtz1974 9y ago

I guess that they should add some unit tests to their vision stack.

berberous 9y ago

"also interesting that no warning alarm sounded at any stage." At 19 seconds, you can see that the dashboard says to put hands on the wheel. Does that not trigger an audible alarm by default in a Tesla?

maratd 9y ago
> Does that not trigger an audible alarm by default in a Tesla No. That's a standard warning that triggers every few minutes if the car can't sense your hands on the wheel. If you don't place your hands on the wheel at that point, then there will be an audible alarm. If you ignore that, the car will slowly reduce speed and come to a halt.
- nnf 9y ago
  > every few minutes *every few seconds (12 seconds, I believe)
  - maratd 9y ago
    It's definitely every few minutes. I can attest to that from personal experience. Alternatively, you can just keep your hands on the wheel and then the warning doesn't come up.
ec109685 9y ago
Not unless you ignore it, then it will beep, then flash red. I think it doesn’t make an audible sound initially so it proves you are paying attention the whole time rather than only when it beeps at you.

slg 9y ago

This video is much more important than anything that was mentioned in the posted article. There are just as many questions about the numerous variables involved in the IIHS study as there are in Tesla's fudged statistics that they always cite. However there is little argument with that video. At some point there really needs to be a legal discussion about whether Tesla's argument that the driver must always be alert and responsible for the car is a realistic standard in which to hold people when semi-autonomous systems are engaged.

buvanshak 9y ago
> At some point there really needs to be a legal discussion about whether Tesla's argument that the driver must always be alert and responsible for the car is a realistic standard This should have been done before these things were ever allowed to put on roads. Zuck is right. We naively trust the world at large to work for our benefit automatically. We truly are "dumb fucks".
emodendroket 9y ago
> At some point there really needs to be a legal discussion about whether Tesla's argument that the driver must always be alert and responsible for the car is a realistic standard in which to hold people when semi-autonomous systems are engaged. It seems completely predictable that it wouldn't be, especially when they call it "autopilot."
- slg 9y ago
  I have addressed this elsewhere in this thread, so let me just copy and paste that comment. >To be fair this is mostly a problem with the general public's understanding of the term autopilot and not with the actual systems that have used that name before. Aeronautical autopilots would probably only be classified as level 1 or maybe level 2 [autonomy] when that term was first coined and used to describe them. Even now I am not sure if we would classify the average autopilots you find on a commercial airliner as being fully at level 4. I don't think Tesla's naming it autopilot should have any impact on any legal discussions. I am not sure the driver should be responsible for everything that happens to the car while autopilot is engaged. However I think it is a completely fair and reasonable expectation that a driver understands what autopilot is capable of doing before they engage it. I don't think Tesla (at least through their marketing, I have heard some questionable things about their salespeople) has been misleading about that in any way. I don't have a lot of faith in people handling a Tesla responsibly if the only thing they know about autopilot is that it is named autopilot.

jijojv 9y ago

OMG this is exactly how it happened in the CA crash...

creato 9y ago

I want to know if the car braked automatically, or the driver had to brake to avoid colliding with the barrier. Also, the warning to put hands on the wheel was a joke. It's incredibly subtle and would only be noticed by someone looking for it, which is probably not the people that most need to respond to the warning.

jijojv 9y ago
That's not a crash warning at all. That is the usual warning ~ every minute to jiggle the wheel if you don't hold the wheel firmly if it can't detect you holding it.
kalleboo 9y ago
> I want to know if the car braked automatically, or the driver had to brake to avoid colliding with the barrier. You can see from the dashboard icons that he disengaged the Autopilot (by taking control). If it had detected an imminent crash it would have made warning sounds.
nnf 9y ago
The initial message that pops up is somewhat easy to miss, but the white flashing at the edges of the instrument panel gets my attention every time. It’s effective enough that I’ve never received the audible alert that comes next. (I don’t use my phone while driving, so my experience is based on looking at the road. Maybe it’s easier to miss when looking downward rather than forward.)

EGreg 9y ago

Hate to say it Tesla but you ain't ready for primetime. Neither is Uber. Waymo is on a whole other level. But I really would love to see more collaboration rather than competition in this area where safety is critical. Pardon the pun - why does everyone need to reinvent the wheel? And also encumber each other with patents? Open source beats proprietary competitive stuff like this.

emodendroket 9y ago
Well, why would they do that unless the regulatory authorities made them? Is Waymo really "there"? It seems like everywhere I turn I'm seeing things that suggest that all of this technology has been hyped far beyond its actual capabilities.
- rtpg 9y ago
  According to a new York times article recently, Waymos vehicles are currently driving on average 5600 miles between user intervention. For Uber this number was 13 5600 miles starts becoming "I need to use the wheel only 4 times a year" territory.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - JKCalhoun 9y ago
    > 5600 miles starts becoming "I need to use the wheel only 4 times a year" territory. It sounds like you're saying I will very likely die 4 times a year. If anything, perhaps the better performing algorithms will lead to more complacency (inattention) on the part of the driver... Sort of a Catch-22? (Or is there a better analogy I'm not thinking of.) Call me a Luddite, but I think I would prefer to steer the car myself, thank you. When someone says, self-driving car, I assume they mean a taxi, bus or train: all well-proven technologies.
    - smnrchrds 9y ago
      Are all 4 interventions safety-critical? They may simply be a case of the car having trouble finding the way out of a parking lot for example.

userbinator 9y ago

A human sees signs at 7s and 24s and the (admittedly not very clear) split of the lane at 27s as well as the yellow sign in the distance indicating the divider, while the autopilot sees a solid white line on the left and continues following it. It probably would've been fine if there was another white line at the split, like this (marked in red here): https://files.catbox.moe/10p2hh.JPG https://files.catbox.moe/10p2hh.JPG

tptacek 9y ago
There is another white line at the split, following the trajectory you've drawn. At the junction of the two lines, it's badly faded, but you can see at :32 and better when he looks up after :34 that the line is there, it's just not as freshly painted. That's not an unusual road condition at all; also: you'd think there'd be some logic reconciling the line it thinks it has to follow with the fact that an entire lane of traffic on the Ryan (the left-most I-94 lane) doesn't abruptly end.
- jcranmer 9y ago
  The lane divider on the right is also quite visible; considering that its internal maps should tell it the road has a left exit, I'd expect that it should be able to guess that it should be holding to the right edge instead of the left edge of the lane. This does bring up a theory: the lane keeping is biased towards holding itself to the left edge of lanes, on the basis that most exits are right exits and therefore the right edge will tend to diverge a ways before making a new lane. I'm curious how it would handle the split at the mixing bowl in Springfield, VA: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.7735345,-77.1816237,3a,19.8y,25.05h,85.97t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1snKnSBVTQcos_8rxxVdvgCA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@38.7735345,-77.1816237,3a,19.8y... (functionally a left exit, although signed as if it were a right exit). The solid white line doesn't actually denote any lane exit boundaries there...

matte_black 9y ago

Christ, this video alone has eliminated any desire I may have had in getting a Tesla once and for all. For me, the one defining feature was self driving capability, but now I see it can’t even do that very safely.

buvanshak 9y ago
Yep. That was scary. You can feel the panic. And even after prompt intervention, that car came pretty close to the median!

jtchang 9y ago

This about as good a bug report as you can file. Can't wait to see Tesla close the issue in Jira with a "Cannot reproduce."

tbabb 9y ago

Wow, that video is pretty damning. (a) Even though the driver was getting a warning to put his hands on the wheel, the car should NOT continue driving forward and piloting itself at all with no driver response and insufficient certainty to continue navigating itself. (b) There was a very obvious hard barrier right in front of the car. Why didn't the collision avoidance detect it and halt the car? (c) The car was clearly "pulled" to the left by the bright exit lane stripe and missing highway-side stripe. Simply following stripes seems an absurdly primitive and unreliable technique to me. The fact that the car could be "distracted" this way suggests to me that it isn't getting (or making good use of) a lot of information that should be available to it-- like the behavior of other traffic, the presence of other obstacles and roadside geometry (like the ignored barrier, which was on a collision path), the trajectory on previous trips (and any conclusions drawn then under better conditions), the road sign which indicated a fork (and which was also itself on a direct collision path), the crosswise striping in between the two forks which the car was driving over, and the striping on the other edge of the lane, and the lanes beyond, which followed the correct trajectory. Each of those things is a significant clue as to the real path of the lane, and are all machine-detectable and processable pieces of information. Even with nontrivial uncertainty about each of them, the totality of information, IMO, should be more than enough to clearly discern the correct lane, especially if efficiently used-- Kalman filter-like information synthesis can take a lot of very uncertain information and synthesize a very certain picture. Instead the machine ignored the holistic picture and "target fixated" on the stripe. This apparently has a disappointingly long way to go before it is a reliable system.

valuearb 9y ago
You don’t understand how these systems work. The optical/radar combo can’t see stationary objects well when the car is going more than 30 MPH, it’s a sea of false positives. This is true of every self driving system on production cars today, 3D Lidar might address it but that’s up to $50K a car.
- bipson 9y ago
  There is no production car with "self driving system" available right now. There are just "assistants", and they can't and should not drive on their own.

chaboud 9y ago

I think that the S and X have three forward-looking cameras center-mounted. Without a binocular baseline with which to establish distance, ranging of on-center obstructions could be difficult. Even if an edge is visible, the frame-to-frame variarion is low, especially for a black rubber sheet at night. I'd also be curious about the radar absorbsion of that rubber impact barrier. This, in part, is why Musk's assertion that this hardware would be sufficient for level 4 autonomy was so ridiculous. It really wasn't the kind of lanuage that a responsible engineer would use.

mdekkers 9y ago
I think that the S and X have three forward-looking cameras center-mounted. And I think that given Tesla's known propensity of logging _everything_, they would ave video footage of those camera's saved somewhere. I wonder if this is submitted as evidence, so we can understand what the car "saw" and "understood", both from optical as well as non-optical sensors...

lzaaa 9y ago

Weird. youtube-dl will not download this video. Can anyone else confirm?

akoumis 9y ago
Works for me
TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
That was also the first thing I thought of. Worked at my end. Ping me if you want a copy, email in my profile.

Tomminn 9y ago

That video is damning-- no doubt. The Tesla should recognize the big barrier and stop or adjust lane well in advance. But what is equally damning is that I can't tell that the Tesla has done anything wrong until it's moments away from hitting that barrier. Who the hell decided that was a sensible way to mark the road? I would strongly prefer no markings to that confidence-inducing single white line, which I have been trained to through years of driving to stay sensibly adjacent to, and which will lead me like a lemming to my death.