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

509 points by nwrk 8y ago

nwrk 8y ago
The report itself - worth of reading https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HWY18FH011-preliminary.pdf https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...
- gwern 8y ago
  No surprise there about it steering into the barrier or Tesla not-quite-lying about him getting warnings, but I'm surprised that he apparently wasn't dead on impact but survived all the way to the hospital? So even a three-car pileup with the Tesla steering straight into a barrier at 71MPH & accelerating, with the car catching on fire & being reduced to a husk, still isn't enough to kill a driver immediately. In a way, you could interpret that as demonstrating how safe Teslas are (at least, without Autopilot).
  - codeonfire 8y ago
    A doctor has to declare a person dead, paramedics can't do it. In all cases it makes sense to transport the body to the hospital where the person is pronounced dead by the doctor. Otherwise the family may argue in court the paramedics did not try enough to save the person.
    - FireBeyond 8y ago
      Not legally true, as a paramedic. EMTs and paramedics are able to declare people dead in certain, albeit limited, circumstances, sometimes involving telephone / radio consultation, sometimes not.
    - gwern 8y ago
      Usually in reports, if someone dies at the scene but is only officially declared dead at the hospital, they'll write a phrase like 'was declared dead at the hospital'. This report says instead that he was transported to the hospital 'where he died from his injuries'. Double-checking, media articles at the time uniformly describe him as dying at the hospital, and at least one says that he died in the afternoon ( http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/03/27/tesla-crash-investigation-highway-101-wei-huang/ http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/03/27/tesla-crash-inve... ) while the accident was at 9:27AM, so either traffic in the Bay Area is even worse than I remember, they like to spend hours doing CPR on a corpse, or he did in fact survive the crash and died at the hospital in a literal and not legalistic sense.
  - Analemma_ 8y ago
    Except in obvious cases like decapitation, paramedics cannot legally declare someone dead; it has to be done by an MD, and the paramedics will keep trying to revive you until you get to the hospital. So it's not necessarily true that he didn't die in the crash.
    - FireBeyond 8y ago
      Not true at all. Paramedics can declare death (at least in most states, I cannot speak to all), and we _absolutely_ can stop resuscitation efforts using our clinical judgment, at times in concert with a physician. I am not sure of the specifics of this case, but traumatic cardiac arrest is, as a generalization, "largely unsurvivable". An asystole EKG, in concert with the mechanism of injury, may be enough for us to do so, and we do not need to transport what is at that point a dead person (even if there is resuscitation being attempted, for a multitude of reasons - sometimes even "for the family's benefit"[1]) just to get them to a physician to declare death. In many states, EMTs (with ~200hrs of medical training) are able to declare death legally, in the setting of evisceration of heart/brain, decapitation, "body position incompatible with life". This is the situation to the best of my knowledge as a paramedic of nine years and a state certified EMS Instructor and Evaluator. [1] it should be noted that this is done in a setting where its judged the "best" course of action for grief, establishing end of life directives, and the like, and _not_ as something that is intended to falsely convey hope.
  - Amezarak 8y ago
    Modern cars are remarkably safe. I've been in a very high speed head-on collision in a Honda and not only survived, but was completely uninjured other than some whiplash.
MBCook 8y ago
“[Driver’s] hands were not detected on the steering wheel for the final six seconds prior to the crash. Tesla has said that Huang received warnings to put his hands on the wheel, but according to the NTSB, these warnings came more than 15 minutes before the crash.” This kind of stuff is why I’ve lost all faith in Tesla’s public statements. What they said here was, for all intents and purposes, a flat out lie. Clearly something went wrong here, but they lept to blaming everyone else instead of working to find the flaw.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jakobegger 8y ago
  Also, „hands were not detected“ does not mean that they really weren‘t on the wheel. Maybe someone who drives a Tesla can comment on how reliable the hand detection is.
  - cf498 8y ago
    No idea about tesla, but how do you screw up hand detenction?
    - sjm-lbm 8y ago
      It's based off measuring torque on the steering column, not some sort of (say) heat or pressure sensors on the wheel itself. So, having your hands on the wheel and not moving them can be sensed by the Tesla as "not having your hands on the wheel".
      - cf498 8y ago
        Learned something new, thanks a lot.
      - MBCook 8y ago
        In my car (a Honda) I can have my hands on the wheel and if I’m not doi enough steering it will yell at me. There are one or two spots around town that are straight enough that I don’t need to give any steering input and it will sometimes flag me there even though my hands were on the wheel the whole time. On a freeway? Don’t think I’ve ever had thay happen though.
netsharc 8y ago
Dear Elon, want to start a website that rates how fake-newsy government-produced accident reports are? /S "FDA said my farm is producing salmonella-infected chicken. Downvote their report on this URL!"
- unethical_ban 8y ago
  Without commenting on the rest of the issues with Musk/Tesla, his tweet about a news verification agency was a joke. Verifiably. It was nicknamed Pravda, and a corporation related to his tweet was registered to Musk on Oct 17 2017, the anniversery of the October Revolution.
  - aerovistae 8y ago
    A joke? It's verifiable because he said he might name it Pravda, and the fact that he actually registered it is further evidence that it's a joke? I'm not saying he's really going to do it, but I question your certainty here with a total lack of actual evidence.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - ComradeTaco 8y ago
      The words of leaders should always be taken literally, because the those words only become "jokes" when they are otherwise unexplainable in rational discussion.
    - unethical_ban 8y ago
      Verifiably is a strong word on this site. Fair enough. I'm still right though. Options: * In 2018, A foreign-born Capitalist billionaire with sometimes negative press coverage suggests creating a Ministry of Truth named after a Russian propaganda newspaper to call out journalists who make false claims in their reporting. He registers a corporation for that purpose on the 100th anniversery of a bloody revolution bringing about the Soviet Union. * A man known for using puns and showmanship in their communications trolled a bunch of people who latch onto his every word, especially when they don't like the man. And to ComradeTaco, this isn't the presidency, and he didn't spout hate speech. It was a joke.
ckastner 8y ago
> His hands were not detected on the steering wheel for the final six seconds prior to the crash. > Tesla has said that Huang received warnings to put his hands on the wheel, but according to the NTSB, these warnings came more than 15 minutes before the crash. > Tesla has emphasized that a damaged crash attenuator had contributed to the severity of the crash. These may or may not have been factors contributing to the death of the driver, and ultimately may or may not absolve Tesla from a legal liability. However, the key point here is that without question, the autopilot failed. It is understandable why Tesla is focusing on the liability issue. This is something that they can dispute. The fact that the autopilot failed is undisputable, and it is unsurprising that Tesla is trying to steer the conversation away from that. The discussion shouldn't be either the driver is at fault or Tesla screwed up, but two separate discussions: whether the driver is at fault, and how Tesla screwed up.
- ebikelaw 8y ago
  The deficiency of Tesla AP has been abundantly clear to anyone with eyes, for a long time. Only fingers-in-ears Musk fans cannot see that.
  - d0lph 8y ago
    Or perhaps us fingers-in-ears Musk fans don't expect the AP to be perfect. Especially considering how new the fields are. Autopilot doesn't need to be perfect, just better than humans.
    - ckastner 8y ago
      It must also never be worse than humans. In this case, it very clearly was.
      - stetrain 8y ago
        So human drivers wouldn't crash here? Or a good, attentive, best-case human driver wouldn't crash here? Because those are not the same set, and it seems the former set has crashed into this particular barrier multiple times. I don't think it's acceptible that a vehicle with adaptive cruise, lane keeping, and emergency braking would hit this barrier without any mitigating braking or action, but the actual state of drivers on the roads and human traffic fatalities is pretty grim as-is.
27182818284 8y ago
The NTSB report confirms that. The crash attenuator—an accordion-like barrier that's supposed to cushion a vehicle when it crashes into the lane separator—had been damaged the previous week when a Toyota Prius crashed at the same location. The resulting damage made the attenuator ineffective and likely contributed to Huang's death. kinda sounds like maybe that part of the road isn't well designed or marked too.
- twblalock 8y ago
  Any kind of self-driving system that is going to be usable and safe in the real world needs to be able to deal with the kind of roads we have in the real world. Maybe one day, when the majority of cars are self-driving, road design will change. To get there, self-driving cars will need to prove themselves on today's roads so people will buy them.
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    Can all driving situations on all roadways today be computed in Polynomial time? Or are some NP? Some intersections are known to be complex for humans to navigate.
- finnthehuman 8y ago
  A crash attenuator is a “nice to have” kind of feature. The minimum drivable roadway conditions can be, and often are, worse. We have higher standards for human drivers and it wouldn’t be news except for the autopilot. Unless you want to ramp up caltrans to the point where it can fix non-essential parts of any and every roadway within hours of degredeation, it’s entirely impractical to expect them to be in perfect shape.
  - jonhendry18 8y ago
    The simplest form of attenuator is just a group of plastic barrels filled with sand or water, which ought to be pretty quick and easy to replace. If California uses something fancier, then sand or water barrels would be an easy stopgap measure.
jakelarkin 8y ago
self driving systems cant well reason about untrained scenarios or the intent of other humans on the road. I think the people have grossly underestimated how driving in an uncontrolled environment is really a general AI problem, which we're not even close to solving.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  Disagree. I think that the likes of Waymo and Cruise understand exactly how hard of a problem this is. It's only companies like Uber and Tesla that are underestimating it, and doing stupid things like disabling automatic braking (Uber) or not using LIDAR (Tesla).
  - jakelarkin 8y ago
    the best software engineering company in the world has spent over a decade and hundreds of $millions on this problem and they are still stuck in a private beta in the easiest road environment they could find. what does that tell you about the feasibility of the solution. There's no evidence that Cruise is in the same class as Waymo.
    - CydeWeys 8y ago
      Waymo is about to start ferrying around paying customers later this year. Nobody said the problem isn't hard, but it definitely does not seem infeasible.
- decacorn1 8y ago
  Decades away, at which point OEMs will have spent billions on a technology unproven and undesired. They will have bankrupted themselves because there is no viable business model other than SaaS and car companies will not transition to SaaS. They can’t even bring themselves to transition to full-electric platforms.
- Animats 8y ago
  This wasn't a hard case that needed advanced AI. This was a clearly visible stationary obstacle on a good freeway on a clear California day.
mymacbook 8y ago
Reading that initial report is terrifying. I am so glad the NTSB set the record straight that the driver had his hands on the wheel for the majority of the final minute of travel. Really makes me feel like Tesla was out to blame the driver from the get go. To be clear the driver is absolutely partially at fault, but my goodness autopilot sped up into the barrier in the final seconds — totally unexpected when the car has automatic emergency breaking. Emergency breaking feels not ready for prime time. I hope there are improvements there. Don’t want to see autopilot disabled as a result of this, would rather Tesla use this to double down and apply new learnings. Just so sad to hear about this guys death on his way to work - not the way I want to go. :(
- testplzignore 8y ago
  > Don’t want to see autopilot disabled as a result of this, would rather Tesla use this to double down and apply new learnings. I agree that Tesla obviously needs to be learning from this. But at this point in time, Autopilot needs to be turned off until Tesla can fix the fundamental flaws in the set of sensors on their cars. There is now strong evidence that Autopilot is dangerous, and there is still weak evidence that it is less dangerous than the alternative (i.e., a human driving). I expect that the NTSB will eventually issue a safety recommendation that Autopilot not be used in its current form. I'm a bit surprised they didn't issue an urgent recommendation in the preliminary report, or even before.
  - TaylorAlexander 8y ago
    I have a hard time seeing it this way. Turned off until they can fix the fundamental flaws? Which flaws exactly? It’s a prototype technology that no one knows how to do perfectly. Should Waymo also be taken off the road? None of these technologies are provably safe, so we always have to accept some risk. How much risk is appropriate is hard to determine. Perhaps LIDAR would reduce the risk, but Uber showed you can kill people even on a LIDAR based vehicle if your software fails to classify the risk properly. And humans drive with just two eyeballs so it’s not unreasonable to think camera based systems should be in principle possible to make safe. So we could pull all the self driving cars off the road, but then we inhibit their ability to collect the wide range of real world data necessary to build the technology. Or we could pull the less successful tech off the road sooner, but that would cause those programs to wither and hand the market to one or two well funded players. I just don’t see how pulling the tech off the road because of a flaw that Tesla has likely already fixed would accomplish much. I do struggle to understand what we should do, but I’m not so quick to think the tech should be pulled.
jackson1way 8y ago
Despite the autopilot failure, I find the battery failure quite remarkable too: > The car was towed to an impound lot, but the vehicle's batteries weren't finished burning. A few hours after the crash, "the Tesla battery emanated smoke and audible venting." Five days later, the smoldering battery reignited, requiring another visit from the fire department. Where is your LiPo god now? Batteries have more energy density than 20 years ago, ok. But they are also much more dangerous. Now imagine the same situation with Tesla's huge semi batteries. They'll have to bury them 6ft under, like Chernobyl's smoldering fuel rods. Minus the radiation.
- curiousgal 8y ago
  Battery failure? You're expecting their engineers to design a battery that remains safe after a 70mph crash into a barrier?
  - jumelles 8y ago
    Yes? Welcome to the automotive industry. Lives are at stake.
    - thatswrong0 8y ago
      Is there an equivalent safety standard for ICE vehicles? I don't think a gas task would do particularly well in the exact same circumstance either
      - aslkdjaslkdj1 8y ago
        Gas can't cause itself to combust due to physical damage. It needs a spark of some sort. Li batteries can self-combust from physical damage.
      - Alupis 8y ago
        ICE vehicles don't typically spontaneously combust after a crash...
EmilyHealth 8y ago
http://everydayhappy7.com/2018/01/16/mix-dried-figs-olive-oil-watch-happens-cholesterol-levels-stomach-issues/ http://everydayhappy7.com/2018/01/16/mix-dried-figs-olive-oi...
beenBoutIT 8y ago
Anyone here actually think Elon uses autopilot?
- jungturk 8y ago
  Not sure about Elon, but I suspect (hope?) most of us Tesla drivers have familiarized themselves with the limitations of the system. Its got a couple scenarios in my experience where it shines - chiefly long drives on clean clear interstates and stop-and-go traffic - but its got suicidal tendencies in others. Its not unlike being driven by a tipsy friend or a teenager - there are enough indications that it can't be trusted. Unlike those situations, its easy enough to take control back once you realize that. Marketing it above its capabilities surely isn't helping, though.
  - Analemma_ 8y ago
    To be blunt, I'm kind of stunned that you are defending a system that you yourself describe as "like being driven by a tipsy friend". What?! Sure, I could sit in the front passenger seat while being driven by my tipsy friend and grab the wheel from him if he was about to steer into a wall, but that is clearly much less safe than just driving myself. And I definitely wouldn't pay for the privilege nor endorse it as a good way to travel! This is what Elon's personality cult, and the psychological need to defend a large purchase, does to people. You are making excuses for a clearly defective product that wouldn't be acceptable if this was anyone other than Tesla.
    - jungturk 8y ago
      Its curious to see you appeal to ad hominems, outrage, and assumptions of bad intent, but I'll give it a go anyhow. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough about the two use cases I cited, but the car performs excellently (and entirely soberly) in those situations. It's a tool that has significant utility and significant footguns. I'm not advocating whether you should use it or not - I'm sharing my experience with where the system delivers and hoping users are looking past the hyperbolic marketing. Its abundantly clear (even to us in the Elon personality cult?) that Tesla and Elon have done themselves a disservice with how they handled this tragedy.
Animats 8y ago
NTSB: • At 8 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was following a lead vehicle and was traveling about 65 mph. • At 7 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla began a left steering movement while following a lead vehicle. • At 4 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was no longer following a lead vehicle. • At 3 seconds prior to the crash and up to the time of impact with the crash attenuator, the Tesla’s speed increased from 62 to 70.8 mph, with no precrash braking or evasive steering movement detected. This is the Tesla self-crashing car in action. Remember how it works. It visually recognizes rear ends of cars using a BW camera and Mobileye (at least in early models) vision software. It also recognizes lane lines and tries to center between them. It has a low resolution radar system which ranges moving metallic objects like cars but ignores stationary obstacles. And there are some side-mounted sonars for detecting vehicles a few meters away on the side, which are not relevant here. The system performed as designed. The white lines of the gore (the painted wedge) leading to this very shallow off ramp become far enough apart that they look like a lane.[1] If the vehicle ever got into the gore area, it would track as if in a lane, right into the crash barrier. It won't stop for the crash barrier, because it doesn't detect stationary obstacles. Here, it sped up, because there was no longer a car ahead. Then it lane-followed right into the crash barrier. That's the fundamental problem here. These vehicles will run into stationary obstacles at full speed with no warning or emergency braking at all. That is by design. This is not an implementation bug or sensor failure. It follows directly from the decision to ship "Autopilot" with that sensor suite and set of capabilities. This behavior is alien to human expectations. Humans intuitively expect an anti-collision system to avoid collisions with obstacles. This system does not do that. It only avoids rear-end collisions with other cars. The normal vehicle behavior of slowing down when it approaches the rear of another car trains users to expect that it will do that consistently. But it doesn't really work that way. Cars are special to the vision system. How did the vehicle get into the gore area? We can only speculate at this point. The paint on the right edge of the gore marking, as seen in Google Maps, is worn near the point of the gore. That may have led the vehicle to track on the left edge of the gore marking, instead of the right. Then it would start centering normally on the wide gore area as if a lane. I expect that the NTSB will have more to say about that later. They may re-drive that area in another similarly equipped Tesla, or run tests on a track. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/bWs6DGsoFmD2 https://goo.gl/maps/bWs6DGsoFmD2
menacingly 8y ago
Tesla has to realize these "shame the dead dude" posts are PR nightmares, right? They are reason alone for me to never consider one, that a private moment for my family might end up a pawn in some "convince the public we're safe using any weasel stretch of the facts we can" effort. If this is disruption, I'll wait for the old guard to catch up, lest I be disrupted into a concrete barrier and my grieving widow fed misleading facts about how it happened.
- justwalt 8y ago
  >shame the deadman posts If that were actually the case, then what are they supposed to say? >lest I be disrupted into a barrier This made me audibly chuckle.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
After this incident and Tesla's response to it, I hope Tesla is sued and or fined into bankruptcy. Tesla is normalizing releasing not fully tested software to do safety-critical things, and literally killing people as a result. A message needs to be sent that this is unacceptable. In addition, their first response is a PR driven response that sought to blame to driver, and violated NTSB procedures. Safety is probably the most important thing to get right with these types of software and Tesla is nonchalantly sacrificing safety for marketing.
- dboreham 8y ago
  And a helpful lesson for all the "excessive government regulation" people.
  - JackCh 8y ago
    Whether regulation is insufficient or excessive should be determined on a case-by-case basis. Anybody making blanket statements about all regulation as a whole is an ideologue who probably should not be taken seriously.
- thomasfortes 8y ago
  Yeah, I can accept that some startups live by "move fast and break things", after all, if I think that their approach is dangerous for me I can choose to not be involved, I can't say the same about being run over by a car that has shitty hardware/software. Autopilot software that are not safer than human pilots shouldn't be allowed to be sold to the general public until they fix their stuff. And even if they are safer most of the time, we are at least used to how human drivers react, most of them don't accelerate just before a crash.
MBCook 8y ago
So people are asking why the barrier wasn’t detected, and that’s fair. Here’s another question: why wasn’t the ‘gore’ zone detected? Why did the car thing it was safe to drive over and area with striped white lines covering the pavement? It saw the white line on the side of that area and decided that was a land market but ignored the striped area you’re not supposed to drive on? If you’re reading the lines on the pavement you have to try to look at all of them. I don’t know if other cars, like those with MobileEye systems, do that but given Tesla’s safety claims they’d better be trying.
- stetrain 8y ago
  This gore zone did not have a striped area, just solid lines on each side. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5582461/Tesla-autopilot-nearly-crashes-exact-spot-Apple-engineer.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5582461/Tesla... Edit: Google street view of the location: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.410912,-122.0757037,3a,75y,205.08h,52.79t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sjXdU2LMnTz4QQshWHKU0Tg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.410912,-122.0757037,3a,75y,2...
  - MBCook 8y ago
    Ah. I wonder if they do recognize the stripes then. BTW does anyone know why it’s called a ‘gore’ zone? I can see it being a (brutal) nickname but I’m hoping there is some better reason.
    - roywiggins 8y ago
      "A gore (British English: nose),[1] refers to a triangular piece of land. Etymologically it is derived from gār, meaning spear." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gore_(road) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gore_(road)
      - MBCook 8y ago
        Thanks.
    - 8y ago
abalone 8y ago
> During the 18-minute 55-second segment, the vehicle provided two visual alerts and one auditory alert for the driver to place his hands on the steering wheel. These alerts were made more than 15 minutes prior to the crash. Whoah. So there were NO alerts for 15 minutes prior to the crash. Compare this with Tesla's earlier statement: > The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive and the driver’s hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision.[1] This gives a very different impression. They omitted the fact that there were no warnings for 15 minutes. Frankly that appears to be an intentionally misleading omission. So basically the driver was distracted for 6 seconds while believing that the car was auto-following the car in front of it. [1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week’s-accident https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week’s-accident
- IkmoIkmo 8y ago
  It's a blatant lie because they knew exactly what they were implying and it wasn't true, i.e, it was a lie.
- buvanshak 8y ago
  About "hands not detected on the wheel part", it seems that the car only detects steering torsion, and it is possible that the driver actually had hands on the wheel, but just didn't provide any steering input.
- Robotbeat 8y ago
  It sounds like exactly the same thing to me.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Even the 'the driver’s hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision' is suspect because it is known to be a pretty unreliable detection mechanism. Besides, it doesn't matter: if the drivers hands were on the steering wheel they clearly weren't alert enough to hit the brakes or steer away from the impact so the point is entirely moot: autopilot was in full control of the car, whether the driver had their hands on the wheel or not to satisfy an alarm doesn't matter.
gburt 8y ago
I am generally against often-called "excessive regulation," but the regulator -- perhaps FTC -- should aggressively prohibit the misleading marketing message here. The entire problem manifests from calling this lane keeping mechanism "Autopilot." Tesla should be prohibited from using that language until they have achieved a provably safer self-driving level 3+. The problem is exacerbated by Musk's aggressive marketing-driven language. Saying things like we're two years out from full self-driving (first said in 2015) and the driver was warned to put his hands on the steering wheel (15 minutes prior to the crash) makes Musk look like he is plainly the bad guy and attempting to be misleading. "Provably safe" probably means some sort of acceptance testing -- a blend of NTSB-operated obstacle course (with regression tests and the like) and real world exposure.
fomefohori 8y ago
Anybody remember this? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/889743782387761152 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/889743782387761152 The ego...
myth_drannon 8y ago
I was listening to a Software Engineering Daily podcast with Lex Fridman about self-driving deep learning. Very interesting topic on ethics of self-driving cars. What he was saying, is that we need to accept the fact that people are going to die following incidents with autonomous vehicles involved. In order for systems to learn how to drive, people will have die. It's more of societal change that is needed. 30,000 people die on the roads in US every year, in order to decrease that number we need self-driving cars even with a price that society as of now can't accept
- wwwdonohue 8y ago
  > we need to accept the fact that people are going to die following incidents with autonomous vehicles involved. Car accidents will kill people at least as long as there are any human-piloted vehicles on the road and probably long after (pedestrians, etc.) What doesn't need to happen is companies in the self-driving space recklessly exaggerating their cars' ability to self-drive.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  It's very possible to get self-driving systems to learn to drive without killing people. Waymo and Cruise have done a good job at that so far, by taking the conservative route of testing their systems in controlled environments before unleashing them on an involuntary public.
EmilyHealth 8y ago
Beleve somone in this article ? http://everydayhappy7.com/2017/06/15/genius-one-husband-13-wives-pregnant-time-month/ http://everydayhappy7.com/2017/06/15/genius-one-husband-13-w...
LinuxBender 8y ago
Disclaimer: Taboo comment ahead. Subtle bugs in self driving cars would be a simple way to assassinate people with low cost overhead. One OTA update to a target and you could probably even get video footage of the job being completed, sent to the client all in one API call. Surely by now someone must have completed a cost analysis of traditional contractors vs. having a plant at a car manufacturer. Am I the only one thinking about this?
- detaro 8y ago
  Probably doesn't need self-driving cars: many higher-end cars nowadays have some kind of wireless interface and software control over speed and steering.
  - LinuxBender 8y ago
    Good point, I should clarify and add in those vehicles, such as the infamous Jeep Grand Cherokee that was hacked on a live highway.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Nope(you're not the only one) - there's a pretty popular conspiracy theory that Michael Hastings(a journalist) was killed by a car hack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_(journalist)#Controversy_over_alleged_foul_play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_(journalist)#...
  - acct1771 8y ago
    Popular for good reason. Certainly read about it outside of Wikipedia
tqi 8y ago
> During the 18-minute 55-second segment, the vehicle provided two visual alerts and one auditory alert for the driver to place his hands on the steering wheel. These alerts were made more than 15 minutes prior to the crash. If your hand is always supposed to be on the wheel, why is does the car not constantly alert you when it detects that your hands are off (similar to how cars beep at you if your seatbelt is unbuckled while driving)?
walrus01 8y ago
This guy tested it at the EXACT same location with tesla autopilot. The Tesla starts steering directly into the barrier before he corrects it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVJSjeHDvfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVJSjeHDvfY
- ninkendo 8y ago
  Hmm, totally off-topic but that line needs to be re-painted. The actual lane marker is almost entirely faded away, while the line that follows the exit lane is bright white. If the glare is bad enough it's possible for a human to end up thinking the more solid line is the lane marker and follow it left. (Not to excuse tesla here though, if that wasn't clear.)
ericb 8y ago
If I was building this, I would upload millions of hours of data from actual Tesla drivers, and I would have autopilot releases step through data and flag the variances from the behavior of the actual drivers. I'd run this in a massively parallel fashion. For every release, I'd expect the score to improve. With a system like this, I would think you'd detect the "drive towards traffic barrier" behavior.
manicdee 8y ago
Short version: due to poor lane markings, Autopilot made the same mistake as many humans in the same situation and collided with the divider. Due to the frequency of this kind of accident, the crash attenuator had been collapsed and not reset meaning the Tesla hit the concrete divider at full speed, as has happened in the past with humans in control. But please continue to blame Autopilot for not being smarter than the human operating the vehicle.
mcguire 8y ago
Here's the most interesting quote to me: "The crash created a big battery fire that destroyed the front of Huang's vehicle. "The Mountain View Fire Department applied approximately 200 gallons of water and foam" over a 10-minute period to put out the fire, the NTSB reported. "The car was towed to an impound lot, but the vehicle's batteries weren't finished burning. A few hours after the crash, "the Tesla battery emanated smoke and audible venting." Five days later, the smoldering battery reignited, requiring another visit from the fire department." Shouldn't it be possible to make the battery safe?
- Robotbeat 8y ago
  It's a lithium-ion battery, so it needs to be fully discharged.
gscott 8y ago
Wait until the Government can just remotely drive your car into a barrier, it will be great!
- wpdev_63 8y ago
  Why would the government ever do that?/s Did you hear what happened to the whistle blower that leaked vault 7? Apparently he had a bunch of child porn on his computer[0]. Crazy huh? [0]:https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/05/ex-cia-employee-idd-but-not-charged-in-vault-7-leak-of-hacking-tools/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/05/ex-cia-employee-...
  - gscott 8y ago
    There was probably an extra thumb drive of child porn for Snowden but he escaped capture.
    - wpdev_63 8y ago
      ....what thumb drive?
      - gscott 8y ago
        The other poster was speaking of entrapment
        wpdev_63 8y ago
        Yeah but where did a thumbdrive come into play?
        gscott 8y ago
        That would be a fictitious example of entrapment to go along with the posters idea that the person who released the nsa tools archive might have been entrapped.
userbinator 8y ago
This just reconfirms my belief about Tesla's "autopilot" --- most of the time it behaves like an OK driver, but occasionally makes a fatal mistake if you don't pay attention and correct it. In other words, you have to be more attentive to drive safely with it than without, since a normal car (with suspension and tires in good condition, on a flat road surface) will not decide to change direction unless explicitly directed to --- it will continue in a straight line even if you take your hands off the wheel. Given that, the value of autopilot seems dubious...
- Robotbeat 8y ago
  You can't make that kind of conclusion from a single, extremely-highly-publicized occurrence, even a fatal one. Given how often human drivers kill people, you need statistics to show that autopilot is worse.
  - jonhendry18 8y ago
    I'm going to need statistics from an independent source, not from Tesla, that autopilot is safer. I'm not inclined to trust Tesla's statistics given how cavalier they have been about putting their shoddy autopilot product on the road and marketing it as being better than it actually is.
    - Robotbeat 8y ago
      Of course. How about the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration? https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/19/nhtsas-full-final-investigation-into-teslas-autopilot-shows-40-crash-rate-reduction/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/19/nhtsas-full-final-investig... A 40% reduction still means plenty of anecdotes for media fodder. There may come a time when autonomous vehicles make driving so safe that the only data we can and should rely on is the rare anecdote like this and the subsequent NTSB report, like airlines. But while it’s always good to take seriously the lessons that NTSB’s targeted investigations provide, a lot more people will die tragic but less-publicized deaths if we stop any company from deploying an imperfect but still overall beneficial technology.
crazygringo 8y ago
Wow. I will say that, when you look straight-on in Street View, it does look disturbingly like a valid lane to drive in -- same width, same markings at one point [1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4106804,-122.075111,3a,75y,117.92h,81.35t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1snAoBJlvBLm0NQWYBWKxWGw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4106804,-122.075111,3a,75y,1... If it were night and a car in front blocking view of the concrete lane divider, it doesn't seem too difficult for a human to change lanes at the last second and collide as well. (And indeed, there was a collision the previous week.) There's no excuse for not having an emergency collision detection system... but it also reminds me how dangerous driving can be period, and how we need to hold autonomous cars to a higher standard. [1] Thanks to comments by Animats and raldi for the location from other angles
newnewpdro 8y ago
Tesla Autocrash, how much does this option cost again?
cmurf 8y ago
Involuntary manslaughter usually refers to an unintentional killing that results from recklessness or criminal negligence, or from an unlawful act that is a misdemeanor or low-level felony (such as a DUI). (Wikipedia) It's rather uncontroversial that this kind of accident falls under civil law, because there is some degree of liability involved in marketing a product as being safer than a human driver, but then fails in an instance where a human driver flat out would not fail: apples to apples. If the human driver is paying attention, which the autonomous system is always doing, they'd never make this mistake. It could only be intentional. But more controversial and therefore more interesting to me, is to what degree the system is acting criminally, even if it's unintended, let alone if it is intended. Now imagine the insurance implications of such a finding of unintended killing. And even worse, imagine the total lack of even trying to make this argument. I think a prosecutor must criminally prosecute Tesla. If not this incident, in the near future. It's an area of law that needs to be aggressively pursued, and voters need to be extremely mindful of treating AI of any kind, with kid gloves, compared to how we've treated humans in the same circumstances.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dcposch 8y ago
Tesla Autopilot makes it to HN pretty much every week now, almost never in a good way. Every time, we have a big discussion about autopilot safety, AI ethics, etc. What about lack of focus? Tesla has already reinvented the car in a big way--all-electric, long range, fast charge, with a huge network of "superchargers". It's taken EV from a niche environmentalist pursuit to something widely seen as the future of automotive. Why are they trying to tackle self-driving cars at the same time? This feels like a classic mistake and case of scope creep. Becoming the Toyota of electric is vast engineering challenge. Level 5 autonomous driving is an equally vast engineering challenge. Both represent once-in-a-generation technological leaps. Trying to tackle both at the same time feels like hubris. If they just made great human-piloted electric cars and focused on cost, production efficiency, volume, and quality, I think they'd be in a better place as a business. Autopilot seems like an expensive distraction.
- jchb 8y ago
  The interior design of the Model 3 is very simple - there are few physical controls - with the assumption that the car usually does not need to be driven by a human. As Elon presented it: https://youtu.be/GZm8ckvsu9I?t=2m2s https://youtu.be/GZm8ckvsu9I?t=2m2s. Pure speculation: perhaps the simplified interior is necessary to bring the costs down for mass-production, and here is where the "synergy" with the autopilot comes in.
stretchwithme 8y ago
Job 1: Don't run into things.
kevinchen 8y ago
Tesla Autopilot should be recalled via the next OTA update. The “Autopilot” branding implies that users need not pay attention, when in reality, the system needs interventions at infrequent but hard-to-predict times. If an engineer at Apple can’t figure it out, then the average person has no chance. Their software sets users up to fail. (Where failure means permanent disability or death.) Inevitably, Musk fans will claim that recalling Autopilot actually makes Tesla drivers less safe. But here's the problem with Musk’s framing of Autopilot. Sure, maybe it fails less often than humans. (We don't know whether we can trust his numbers.) But we do know that when it fails, it fails in different ways — Autopilot crashes are noteworthy because they happen in situations where human drivers would have no problem. That’s what people can’t get over. And it is why Autopilot is such a dangerous feature. An automaker with more humility would’ve disabled this feature years ago. (Even Uber suspended testing after the Arizona crash!) With Musk, my fear is that more people will have to die before there is enough pressure from regulators / the public to pull the plug.
- Traubenfuchs 8y ago
  > But we do know that when it fails, it fails in different Oh the hubris of man. I am not even a Tesla fan, but still. "I'd rather have 2 of 100 people drive against a wall instead of 1 of 100 automatic cars driving against a wall.", that's what you are essentially saying, no?
jhanschoo 8y ago
Here's a relevant video that shows autopilot directing a Tesla into lane split. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QCF8tVqM3I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QCF8tVqM3I
deaps 8y ago
I think one of my main concerns with "autopilot" is that for a lot of drivers, it will absolutely make the roads safer for them and those that use the roads around them. Consequently, for some safer and more-alert drivers, it has the potential to make driving less safe.
dre85 8y ago
I wonder what percentage of owners actually have the courage to turn on autopilot? How many people here would/do?

509 points by nwrk 8y ago

nwrk 8y ago

The report itself - worth of reading https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HWY18FH011-preliminary.pdf https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...

gwern 8y ago
No surprise there about it steering into the barrier or Tesla not-quite-lying about him getting warnings, but I'm surprised that he apparently wasn't dead on impact but survived all the way to the hospital? So even a three-car pileup with the Tesla steering straight into a barrier at 71MPH & accelerating, with the car catching on fire & being reduced to a husk, still isn't enough to kill a driver immediately. In a way, you could interpret that as demonstrating how safe Teslas are (at least, without Autopilot).
- codeonfire 8y ago
  A doctor has to declare a person dead, paramedics can't do it. In all cases it makes sense to transport the body to the hospital where the person is pronounced dead by the doctor. Otherwise the family may argue in court the paramedics did not try enough to save the person.
  - FireBeyond 8y ago
    Not legally true, as a paramedic. EMTs and paramedics are able to declare people dead in certain, albeit limited, circumstances, sometimes involving telephone / radio consultation, sometimes not.
  - gwern 8y ago
    Usually in reports, if someone dies at the scene but is only officially declared dead at the hospital, they'll write a phrase like 'was declared dead at the hospital'. This report says instead that he was transported to the hospital 'where he died from his injuries'. Double-checking, media articles at the time uniformly describe him as dying at the hospital, and at least one says that he died in the afternoon ( http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/03/27/tesla-crash-investigation-highway-101-wei-huang/ http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/03/27/tesla-crash-inve... ) while the accident was at 9:27AM, so either traffic in the Bay Area is even worse than I remember, they like to spend hours doing CPR on a corpse, or he did in fact survive the crash and died at the hospital in a literal and not legalistic sense.
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  Except in obvious cases like decapitation, paramedics cannot legally declare someone dead; it has to be done by an MD, and the paramedics will keep trying to revive you until you get to the hospital. So it's not necessarily true that he didn't die in the crash.
  - FireBeyond 8y ago
    Not true at all. Paramedics can declare death (at least in most states, I cannot speak to all), and we _absolutely_ can stop resuscitation efforts using our clinical judgment, at times in concert with a physician. I am not sure of the specifics of this case, but traumatic cardiac arrest is, as a generalization, "largely unsurvivable". An asystole EKG, in concert with the mechanism of injury, may be enough for us to do so, and we do not need to transport what is at that point a dead person (even if there is resuscitation being attempted, for a multitude of reasons - sometimes even "for the family's benefit"[1]) just to get them to a physician to declare death. In many states, EMTs (with ~200hrs of medical training) are able to declare death legally, in the setting of evisceration of heart/brain, decapitation, "body position incompatible with life". This is the situation to the best of my knowledge as a paramedic of nine years and a state certified EMS Instructor and Evaluator. [1] it should be noted that this is done in a setting where its judged the "best" course of action for grief, establishing end of life directives, and the like, and _not_ as something that is intended to falsely convey hope.
- Amezarak 8y ago
  Modern cars are remarkably safe. I've been in a very high speed head-on collision in a Honda and not only survived, but was completely uninjured other than some whiplash.

MBCook 8y ago

“[Driver’s] hands were not detected on the steering wheel for the final six seconds prior to the crash. Tesla has said that Huang received warnings to put his hands on the wheel, but according to the NTSB, these warnings came more than 15 minutes before the crash.” This kind of stuff is why I’ve lost all faith in Tesla’s public statements. What they said here was, for all intents and purposes, a flat out lie. Clearly something went wrong here, but they lept to blaming everyone else instead of working to find the flaw.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jakobegger 8y ago
Also, „hands were not detected“ does not mean that they really weren‘t on the wheel. Maybe someone who drives a Tesla can comment on how reliable the hand detection is.
- cf498 8y ago
  No idea about tesla, but how do you screw up hand detenction?
  - sjm-lbm 8y ago
    It's based off measuring torque on the steering column, not some sort of (say) heat or pressure sensors on the wheel itself. So, having your hands on the wheel and not moving them can be sensed by the Tesla as "not having your hands on the wheel".
    - cf498 8y ago
      Learned something new, thanks a lot.
    - MBCook 8y ago
      In my car (a Honda) I can have my hands on the wheel and if I’m not doi enough steering it will yell at me. There are one or two spots around town that are straight enough that I don’t need to give any steering input and it will sometimes flag me there even though my hands were on the wheel the whole time. On a freeway? Don’t think I’ve ever had thay happen though.

netsharc 8y ago

Dear Elon, want to start a website that rates how fake-newsy government-produced accident reports are? /S "FDA said my farm is producing salmonella-infected chicken. Downvote their report on this URL!"

unethical_ban 8y ago
Without commenting on the rest of the issues with Musk/Tesla, his tweet about a news verification agency was a joke. Verifiably. It was nicknamed Pravda, and a corporation related to his tweet was registered to Musk on Oct 17 2017, the anniversery of the October Revolution.
- aerovistae 8y ago
  A joke? It's verifiable because he said he might name it Pravda, and the fact that he actually registered it is further evidence that it's a joke? I'm not saying he's really going to do it, but I question your certainty here with a total lack of actual evidence.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - ComradeTaco 8y ago
    The words of leaders should always be taken literally, because the those words only become "jokes" when they are otherwise unexplainable in rational discussion.
  - unethical_ban 8y ago
    Verifiably is a strong word on this site. Fair enough. I'm still right though. Options: * In 2018, A foreign-born Capitalist billionaire with sometimes negative press coverage suggests creating a Ministry of Truth named after a Russian propaganda newspaper to call out journalists who make false claims in their reporting. He registers a corporation for that purpose on the 100th anniversery of a bloody revolution bringing about the Soviet Union. * A man known for using puns and showmanship in their communications trolled a bunch of people who latch onto his every word, especially when they don't like the man. And to ComradeTaco, this isn't the presidency, and he didn't spout hate speech. It was a joke.

ckastner 8y ago

> His hands were not detected on the steering wheel for the final six seconds prior to the crash. > Tesla has said that Huang received warnings to put his hands on the wheel, but according to the NTSB, these warnings came more than 15 minutes before the crash. > Tesla has emphasized that a damaged crash attenuator had contributed to the severity of the crash. These may or may not have been factors contributing to the death of the driver, and ultimately may or may not absolve Tesla from a legal liability. However, the key point here is that without question, the autopilot failed. It is understandable why Tesla is focusing on the liability issue. This is something that they can dispute. The fact that the autopilot failed is undisputable, and it is unsurprising that Tesla is trying to steer the conversation away from that. The discussion shouldn't be either the driver is at fault or Tesla screwed up, but two separate discussions: whether the driver is at fault, and how Tesla screwed up.

ebikelaw 8y ago
The deficiency of Tesla AP has been abundantly clear to anyone with eyes, for a long time. Only fingers-in-ears Musk fans cannot see that.
- d0lph 8y ago
  Or perhaps us fingers-in-ears Musk fans don't expect the AP to be perfect. Especially considering how new the fields are. Autopilot doesn't need to be perfect, just better than humans.
  - ckastner 8y ago
    It must also never be worse than humans. In this case, it very clearly was.
    - stetrain 8y ago
      So human drivers wouldn't crash here? Or a good, attentive, best-case human driver wouldn't crash here? Because those are not the same set, and it seems the former set has crashed into this particular barrier multiple times. I don't think it's acceptible that a vehicle with adaptive cruise, lane keeping, and emergency braking would hit this barrier without any mitigating braking or action, but the actual state of drivers on the roads and human traffic fatalities is pretty grim as-is.

27182818284 8y ago

The NTSB report confirms that. The crash attenuator—an accordion-like barrier that's supposed to cushion a vehicle when it crashes into the lane separator—had been damaged the previous week when a Toyota Prius crashed at the same location. The resulting damage made the attenuator ineffective and likely contributed to Huang's death. kinda sounds like maybe that part of the road isn't well designed or marked too.

twblalock 8y ago
Any kind of self-driving system that is going to be usable and safe in the real world needs to be able to deal with the kind of roads we have in the real world. Maybe one day, when the majority of cars are self-driving, road design will change. To get there, self-driving cars will need to prove themselves on today's roads so people will buy them.
- stephengillie 8y ago
  Can all driving situations on all roadways today be computed in Polynomial time? Or are some NP? Some intersections are known to be complex for humans to navigate.
finnthehuman 8y ago
A crash attenuator is a “nice to have” kind of feature. The minimum drivable roadway conditions can be, and often are, worse. We have higher standards for human drivers and it wouldn’t be news except for the autopilot. Unless you want to ramp up caltrans to the point where it can fix non-essential parts of any and every roadway within hours of degredeation, it’s entirely impractical to expect them to be in perfect shape.
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  The simplest form of attenuator is just a group of plastic barrels filled with sand or water, which ought to be pretty quick and easy to replace. If California uses something fancier, then sand or water barrels would be an easy stopgap measure.

jakelarkin 8y ago

self driving systems cant well reason about untrained scenarios or the intent of other humans on the road. I think the people have grossly underestimated how driving in an uncontrolled environment is really a general AI problem, which we're not even close to solving.

CydeWeys 8y ago
Disagree. I think that the likes of Waymo and Cruise understand exactly how hard of a problem this is. It's only companies like Uber and Tesla that are underestimating it, and doing stupid things like disabling automatic braking (Uber) or not using LIDAR (Tesla).
- jakelarkin 8y ago
  the best software engineering company in the world has spent over a decade and hundreds of $millions on this problem and they are still stuck in a private beta in the easiest road environment they could find. what does that tell you about the feasibility of the solution. There's no evidence that Cruise is in the same class as Waymo.
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    Waymo is about to start ferrying around paying customers later this year. Nobody said the problem isn't hard, but it definitely does not seem infeasible.
decacorn1 8y ago
Decades away, at which point OEMs will have spent billions on a technology unproven and undesired. They will have bankrupted themselves because there is no viable business model other than SaaS and car companies will not transition to SaaS. They can’t even bring themselves to transition to full-electric platforms.
Animats 8y ago
This wasn't a hard case that needed advanced AI. This was a clearly visible stationary obstacle on a good freeway on a clear California day.

mymacbook 8y ago

Reading that initial report is terrifying. I am so glad the NTSB set the record straight that the driver had his hands on the wheel for the majority of the final minute of travel. Really makes me feel like Tesla was out to blame the driver from the get go. To be clear the driver is absolutely partially at fault, but my goodness autopilot sped up into the barrier in the final seconds — totally unexpected when the car has automatic emergency breaking. Emergency breaking feels not ready for prime time. I hope there are improvements there. Don’t want to see autopilot disabled as a result of this, would rather Tesla use this to double down and apply new learnings. Just so sad to hear about this guys death on his way to work - not the way I want to go. :(

testplzignore 8y ago
> Don’t want to see autopilot disabled as a result of this, would rather Tesla use this to double down and apply new learnings. I agree that Tesla obviously needs to be learning from this. But at this point in time, Autopilot needs to be turned off until Tesla can fix the fundamental flaws in the set of sensors on their cars. There is now strong evidence that Autopilot is dangerous, and there is still weak evidence that it is less dangerous than the alternative (i.e., a human driving). I expect that the NTSB will eventually issue a safety recommendation that Autopilot not be used in its current form. I'm a bit surprised they didn't issue an urgent recommendation in the preliminary report, or even before.
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  I have a hard time seeing it this way. Turned off until they can fix the fundamental flaws? Which flaws exactly? It’s a prototype technology that no one knows how to do perfectly. Should Waymo also be taken off the road? None of these technologies are provably safe, so we always have to accept some risk. How much risk is appropriate is hard to determine. Perhaps LIDAR would reduce the risk, but Uber showed you can kill people even on a LIDAR based vehicle if your software fails to classify the risk properly. And humans drive with just two eyeballs so it’s not unreasonable to think camera based systems should be in principle possible to make safe. So we could pull all the self driving cars off the road, but then we inhibit their ability to collect the wide range of real world data necessary to build the technology. Or we could pull the less successful tech off the road sooner, but that would cause those programs to wither and hand the market to one or two well funded players. I just don’t see how pulling the tech off the road because of a flaw that Tesla has likely already fixed would accomplish much. I do struggle to understand what we should do, but I’m not so quick to think the tech should be pulled.

jackson1way 8y ago

Despite the autopilot failure, I find the battery failure quite remarkable too: > The car was towed to an impound lot, but the vehicle's batteries weren't finished burning. A few hours after the crash, "the Tesla battery emanated smoke and audible venting." Five days later, the smoldering battery reignited, requiring another visit from the fire department. Where is your LiPo god now? Batteries have more energy density than 20 years ago, ok. But they are also much more dangerous. Now imagine the same situation with Tesla's huge semi batteries. They'll have to bury them 6ft under, like Chernobyl's smoldering fuel rods. Minus the radiation.

curiousgal 8y ago
Battery failure? You're expecting their engineers to design a battery that remains safe after a 70mph crash into a barrier?
- jumelles 8y ago
  Yes? Welcome to the automotive industry. Lives are at stake.
  - thatswrong0 8y ago
    Is there an equivalent safety standard for ICE vehicles? I don't think a gas task would do particularly well in the exact same circumstance either
    - aslkdjaslkdj1 8y ago
      Gas can't cause itself to combust due to physical damage. It needs a spark of some sort. Li batteries can self-combust from physical damage.
    - Alupis 8y ago
      ICE vehicles don't typically spontaneously combust after a crash...

EmilyHealth 8y ago

http://everydayhappy7.com/2018/01/16/mix-dried-figs-olive-oil-watch-happens-cholesterol-levels-stomach-issues/ http://everydayhappy7.com/2018/01/16/mix-dried-figs-olive-oi...

beenBoutIT 8y ago

Anyone here actually think Elon uses autopilot?

jungturk 8y ago
Not sure about Elon, but I suspect (hope?) most of us Tesla drivers have familiarized themselves with the limitations of the system. Its got a couple scenarios in my experience where it shines - chiefly long drives on clean clear interstates and stop-and-go traffic - but its got suicidal tendencies in others. Its not unlike being driven by a tipsy friend or a teenager - there are enough indications that it can't be trusted. Unlike those situations, its easy enough to take control back once you realize that. Marketing it above its capabilities surely isn't helping, though.
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  To be blunt, I'm kind of stunned that you are defending a system that you yourself describe as "like being driven by a tipsy friend". What?! Sure, I could sit in the front passenger seat while being driven by my tipsy friend and grab the wheel from him if he was about to steer into a wall, but that is clearly much less safe than just driving myself. And I definitely wouldn't pay for the privilege nor endorse it as a good way to travel! This is what Elon's personality cult, and the psychological need to defend a large purchase, does to people. You are making excuses for a clearly defective product that wouldn't be acceptable if this was anyone other than Tesla.
  - jungturk 8y ago
    Its curious to see you appeal to ad hominems, outrage, and assumptions of bad intent, but I'll give it a go anyhow. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough about the two use cases I cited, but the car performs excellently (and entirely soberly) in those situations. It's a tool that has significant utility and significant footguns. I'm not advocating whether you should use it or not - I'm sharing my experience with where the system delivers and hoping users are looking past the hyperbolic marketing. Its abundantly clear (even to us in the Elon personality cult?) that Tesla and Elon have done themselves a disservice with how they handled this tragedy.

Animats 8y ago

NTSB: • At 8 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was following a lead vehicle and was traveling about 65 mph. • At 7 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla began a left steering movement while following a lead vehicle. • At 4 seconds prior to the crash, the Tesla was no longer following a lead vehicle. • At 3 seconds prior to the crash and up to the time of impact with the crash attenuator, the Tesla’s speed increased from 62 to 70.8 mph, with no precrash braking or evasive steering movement detected. This is the Tesla self-crashing car in action. Remember how it works. It visually recognizes rear ends of cars using a BW camera and Mobileye (at least in early models) vision software. It also recognizes lane lines and tries to center between them. It has a low resolution radar system which ranges moving metallic objects like cars but ignores stationary obstacles. And there are some side-mounted sonars for detecting vehicles a few meters away on the side, which are not relevant here. The system performed as designed. The white lines of the gore (the painted wedge) leading to this very shallow off ramp become far enough apart that they look like a lane.[1] If the vehicle ever got into the gore area, it would track as if in a lane, right into the crash barrier. It won't stop for the crash barrier, because it doesn't detect stationary obstacles. Here, it sped up, because there was no longer a car ahead. Then it lane-followed right into the crash barrier. That's the fundamental problem here. These vehicles will run into stationary obstacles at full speed with no warning or emergency braking at all. That is by design. This is not an implementation bug or sensor failure. It follows directly from the decision to ship "Autopilot" with that sensor suite and set of capabilities. This behavior is alien to human expectations. Humans intuitively expect an anti-collision system to avoid collisions with obstacles. This system does not do that. It only avoids rear-end collisions with other cars. The normal vehicle behavior of slowing down when it approaches the rear of another car trains users to expect that it will do that consistently. But it doesn't really work that way. Cars are special to the vision system. How did the vehicle get into the gore area? We can only speculate at this point. The paint on the right edge of the gore marking, as seen in Google Maps, is worn near the point of the gore. That may have led the vehicle to track on the left edge of the gore marking, instead of the right. Then it would start centering normally on the wide gore area as if a lane. I expect that the NTSB will have more to say about that later. They may re-drive that area in another similarly equipped Tesla, or run tests on a track. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/bWs6DGsoFmD2 https://goo.gl/maps/bWs6DGsoFmD2

menacingly 8y ago

Tesla has to realize these "shame the dead dude" posts are PR nightmares, right? They are reason alone for me to never consider one, that a private moment for my family might end up a pawn in some "convince the public we're safe using any weasel stretch of the facts we can" effort. If this is disruption, I'll wait for the old guard to catch up, lest I be disrupted into a concrete barrier and my grieving widow fed misleading facts about how it happened.

justwalt 8y ago
>shame the deadman posts If that were actually the case, then what are they supposed to say? >lest I be disrupted into a barrier This made me audibly chuckle.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago

After this incident and Tesla's response to it, I hope Tesla is sued and or fined into bankruptcy. Tesla is normalizing releasing not fully tested software to do safety-critical things, and literally killing people as a result. A message needs to be sent that this is unacceptable. In addition, their first response is a PR driven response that sought to blame to driver, and violated NTSB procedures. Safety is probably the most important thing to get right with these types of software and Tesla is nonchalantly sacrificing safety for marketing.

dboreham 8y ago
And a helpful lesson for all the "excessive government regulation" people.
- JackCh 8y ago
  Whether regulation is insufficient or excessive should be determined on a case-by-case basis. Anybody making blanket statements about all regulation as a whole is an ideologue who probably should not be taken seriously.
thomasfortes 8y ago
Yeah, I can accept that some startups live by "move fast and break things", after all, if I think that their approach is dangerous for me I can choose to not be involved, I can't say the same about being run over by a car that has shitty hardware/software. Autopilot software that are not safer than human pilots shouldn't be allowed to be sold to the general public until they fix their stuff. And even if they are safer most of the time, we are at least used to how human drivers react, most of them don't accelerate just before a crash.

MBCook 8y ago

So people are asking why the barrier wasn’t detected, and that’s fair. Here’s another question: why wasn’t the ‘gore’ zone detected? Why did the car thing it was safe to drive over and area with striped white lines covering the pavement? It saw the white line on the side of that area and decided that was a land market but ignored the striped area you’re not supposed to drive on? If you’re reading the lines on the pavement you have to try to look at all of them. I don’t know if other cars, like those with MobileEye systems, do that but given Tesla’s safety claims they’d better be trying.

stetrain 8y ago
This gore zone did not have a striped area, just solid lines on each side. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5582461/Tesla-autopilot-nearly-crashes-exact-spot-Apple-engineer.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5582461/Tesla... Edit: Google street view of the location: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.410912,-122.0757037,3a,75y,205.08h,52.79t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sjXdU2LMnTz4QQshWHKU0Tg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.410912,-122.0757037,3a,75y,2...
- MBCook 8y ago
  Ah. I wonder if they do recognize the stripes then. BTW does anyone know why it’s called a ‘gore’ zone? I can see it being a (brutal) nickname but I’m hoping there is some better reason.
  - roywiggins 8y ago
    "A gore (British English: nose),[1] refers to a triangular piece of land. Etymologically it is derived from gār, meaning spear." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gore_(road) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gore_(road)
    - MBCook 8y ago
      Thanks.
  - 8y ago

abalone 8y ago

> During the 18-minute 55-second segment, the vehicle provided two visual alerts and one auditory alert for the driver to place his hands on the steering wheel. These alerts were made more than 15 minutes prior to the crash. Whoah. So there were NO alerts for 15 minutes prior to the crash. Compare this with Tesla's earlier statement: > The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive and the driver’s hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision.[1] This gives a very different impression. They omitted the fact that there were no warnings for 15 minutes. Frankly that appears to be an intentionally misleading omission. So basically the driver was distracted for 6 seconds while believing that the car was auto-following the car in front of it. [1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week’s-accident https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week’s-accident

IkmoIkmo 8y ago
It's a blatant lie because they knew exactly what they were implying and it wasn't true, i.e, it was a lie.
buvanshak 8y ago
About "hands not detected on the wheel part", it seems that the car only detects steering torsion, and it is possible that the driver actually had hands on the wheel, but just didn't provide any steering input.
Robotbeat 8y ago
It sounds like exactly the same thing to me.
jacquesm 8y ago
Even the 'the driver’s hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision' is suspect because it is known to be a pretty unreliable detection mechanism. Besides, it doesn't matter: if the drivers hands were on the steering wheel they clearly weren't alert enough to hit the brakes or steer away from the impact so the point is entirely moot: autopilot was in full control of the car, whether the driver had their hands on the wheel or not to satisfy an alarm doesn't matter.

gburt 8y ago

I am generally against often-called "excessive regulation," but the regulator -- perhaps FTC -- should aggressively prohibit the misleading marketing message here. The entire problem manifests from calling this lane keeping mechanism "Autopilot." Tesla should be prohibited from using that language until they have achieved a provably safer self-driving level 3+. The problem is exacerbated by Musk's aggressive marketing-driven language. Saying things like we're two years out from full self-driving (first said in 2015) and the driver was warned to put his hands on the steering wheel (15 minutes prior to the crash) makes Musk look like he is plainly the bad guy and attempting to be misleading. "Provably safe" probably means some sort of acceptance testing -- a blend of NTSB-operated obstacle course (with regression tests and the like) and real world exposure.

fomefohori 8y ago

Anybody remember this? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/889743782387761152 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/889743782387761152 The ego...

myth_drannon 8y ago

I was listening to a Software Engineering Daily podcast with Lex Fridman about self-driving deep learning. Very interesting topic on ethics of self-driving cars. What he was saying, is that we need to accept the fact that people are going to die following incidents with autonomous vehicles involved. In order for systems to learn how to drive, people will have die. It's more of societal change that is needed. 30,000 people die on the roads in US every year, in order to decrease that number we need self-driving cars even with a price that society as of now can't accept

wwwdonohue 8y ago
> we need to accept the fact that people are going to die following incidents with autonomous vehicles involved. Car accidents will kill people at least as long as there are any human-piloted vehicles on the road and probably long after (pedestrians, etc.) What doesn't need to happen is companies in the self-driving space recklessly exaggerating their cars' ability to self-drive.
gamblor956 8y ago
It's very possible to get self-driving systems to learn to drive without killing people. Waymo and Cruise have done a good job at that so far, by taking the conservative route of testing their systems in controlled environments before unleashing them on an involuntary public.

EmilyHealth 8y ago

Beleve somone in this article ? http://everydayhappy7.com/2017/06/15/genius-one-husband-13-wives-pregnant-time-month/ http://everydayhappy7.com/2017/06/15/genius-one-husband-13-w...

LinuxBender 8y ago

Disclaimer: Taboo comment ahead. Subtle bugs in self driving cars would be a simple way to assassinate people with low cost overhead. One OTA update to a target and you could probably even get video footage of the job being completed, sent to the client all in one API call. Surely by now someone must have completed a cost analysis of traditional contractors vs. having a plant at a car manufacturer. Am I the only one thinking about this?

detaro 8y ago
Probably doesn't need self-driving cars: many higher-end cars nowadays have some kind of wireless interface and software control over speed and steering.
- LinuxBender 8y ago
  Good point, I should clarify and add in those vehicles, such as the infamous Jeep Grand Cherokee that was hacked on a live highway.
oh_sigh 8y ago
Nope(you're not the only one) - there's a pretty popular conspiracy theory that Michael Hastings(a journalist) was killed by a car hack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_(journalist)#Controversy_over_alleged_foul_play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_(journalist)#...
- acct1771 8y ago
  Popular for good reason. Certainly read about it outside of Wikipedia

tqi 8y ago

> During the 18-minute 55-second segment, the vehicle provided two visual alerts and one auditory alert for the driver to place his hands on the steering wheel. These alerts were made more than 15 minutes prior to the crash. If your hand is always supposed to be on the wheel, why is does the car not constantly alert you when it detects that your hands are off (similar to how cars beep at you if your seatbelt is unbuckled while driving)?

walrus01 8y ago

This guy tested it at the EXACT same location with tesla autopilot. The Tesla starts steering directly into the barrier before he corrects it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVJSjeHDvfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVJSjeHDvfY

ninkendo 8y ago
Hmm, totally off-topic but that line needs to be re-painted. The actual lane marker is almost entirely faded away, while the line that follows the exit lane is bright white. If the glare is bad enough it's possible for a human to end up thinking the more solid line is the lane marker and follow it left. (Not to excuse tesla here though, if that wasn't clear.)

ericb 8y ago

If I was building this, I would upload millions of hours of data from actual Tesla drivers, and I would have autopilot releases step through data and flag the variances from the behavior of the actual drivers. I'd run this in a massively parallel fashion. For every release, I'd expect the score to improve. With a system like this, I would think you'd detect the "drive towards traffic barrier" behavior.

manicdee 8y ago

Short version: due to poor lane markings, Autopilot made the same mistake as many humans in the same situation and collided with the divider. Due to the frequency of this kind of accident, the crash attenuator had been collapsed and not reset meaning the Tesla hit the concrete divider at full speed, as has happened in the past with humans in control. But please continue to blame Autopilot for not being smarter than the human operating the vehicle.

mcguire 8y ago

Here's the most interesting quote to me: "The crash created a big battery fire that destroyed the front of Huang's vehicle. "The Mountain View Fire Department applied approximately 200 gallons of water and foam" over a 10-minute period to put out the fire, the NTSB reported. "The car was towed to an impound lot, but the vehicle's batteries weren't finished burning. A few hours after the crash, "the Tesla battery emanated smoke and audible venting." Five days later, the smoldering battery reignited, requiring another visit from the fire department." Shouldn't it be possible to make the battery safe?

Robotbeat 8y ago
It's a lithium-ion battery, so it needs to be fully discharged.

gscott 8y ago

Wait until the Government can just remotely drive your car into a barrier, it will be great!

wpdev_63 8y ago
Why would the government ever do that?/s Did you hear what happened to the whistle blower that leaked vault 7? Apparently he had a bunch of child porn on his computer[0]. Crazy huh? [0]:https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/05/ex-cia-employee-idd-but-not-charged-in-vault-7-leak-of-hacking-tools/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/05/ex-cia-employee-...
- gscott 8y ago
  There was probably an extra thumb drive of child porn for Snowden but he escaped capture.
  - wpdev_63 8y ago
    ....what thumb drive?
    - gscott 8y ago
      The other poster was speaking of entrapment
      - wpdev_63 8y ago
        Yeah but where did a thumbdrive come into play?
        gscott 8y ago
        That would be a fictitious example of entrapment to go along with the posters idea that the person who released the nsa tools archive might have been entrapped.

userbinator 8y ago

This just reconfirms my belief about Tesla's "autopilot" --- most of the time it behaves like an OK driver, but occasionally makes a fatal mistake if you don't pay attention and correct it. In other words, you have to be more attentive to drive safely with it than without, since a normal car (with suspension and tires in good condition, on a flat road surface) will not decide to change direction unless explicitly directed to --- it will continue in a straight line even if you take your hands off the wheel. Given that, the value of autopilot seems dubious...

Robotbeat 8y ago
You can't make that kind of conclusion from a single, extremely-highly-publicized occurrence, even a fatal one. Given how often human drivers kill people, you need statistics to show that autopilot is worse.
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  I'm going to need statistics from an independent source, not from Tesla, that autopilot is safer. I'm not inclined to trust Tesla's statistics given how cavalier they have been about putting their shoddy autopilot product on the road and marketing it as being better than it actually is.
  - Robotbeat 8y ago
    Of course. How about the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration? https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/19/nhtsas-full-final-investigation-into-teslas-autopilot-shows-40-crash-rate-reduction/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/19/nhtsas-full-final-investig... A 40% reduction still means plenty of anecdotes for media fodder. There may come a time when autonomous vehicles make driving so safe that the only data we can and should rely on is the rare anecdote like this and the subsequent NTSB report, like airlines. But while it’s always good to take seriously the lessons that NTSB’s targeted investigations provide, a lot more people will die tragic but less-publicized deaths if we stop any company from deploying an imperfect but still overall beneficial technology.

crazygringo 8y ago

Wow. I will say that, when you look straight-on in Street View, it does look disturbingly like a valid lane to drive in -- same width, same markings at one point [1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4106804,-122.075111,3a,75y,117.92h,81.35t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1snAoBJlvBLm0NQWYBWKxWGw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4106804,-122.075111,3a,75y,1... If it were night and a car in front blocking view of the concrete lane divider, it doesn't seem too difficult for a human to change lanes at the last second and collide as well. (And indeed, there was a collision the previous week.) There's no excuse for not having an emergency collision detection system... but it also reminds me how dangerous driving can be period, and how we need to hold autonomous cars to a higher standard. [1] Thanks to comments by Animats and raldi for the location from other angles

newnewpdro 8y ago

Tesla Autocrash, how much does this option cost again?

cmurf 8y ago

Involuntary manslaughter usually refers to an unintentional killing that results from recklessness or criminal negligence, or from an unlawful act that is a misdemeanor or low-level felony (such as a DUI). (Wikipedia) It's rather uncontroversial that this kind of accident falls under civil law, because there is some degree of liability involved in marketing a product as being safer than a human driver, but then fails in an instance where a human driver flat out would not fail: apples to apples. If the human driver is paying attention, which the autonomous system is always doing, they'd never make this mistake. It could only be intentional. But more controversial and therefore more interesting to me, is to what degree the system is acting criminally, even if it's unintended, let alone if it is intended. Now imagine the insurance implications of such a finding of unintended killing. And even worse, imagine the total lack of even trying to make this argument. I think a prosecutor must criminally prosecute Tesla. If not this incident, in the near future. It's an area of law that needs to be aggressively pursued, and voters need to be extremely mindful of treating AI of any kind, with kid gloves, compared to how we've treated humans in the same circumstances.

deleted 8y ago

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dcposch 8y ago

Tesla Autopilot makes it to HN pretty much every week now, almost never in a good way. Every time, we have a big discussion about autopilot safety, AI ethics, etc. What about lack of focus? Tesla has already reinvented the car in a big way--all-electric, long range, fast charge, with a huge network of "superchargers". It's taken EV from a niche environmentalist pursuit to something widely seen as the future of automotive. Why are they trying to tackle self-driving cars at the same time? This feels like a classic mistake and case of scope creep. Becoming the Toyota of electric is vast engineering challenge. Level 5 autonomous driving is an equally vast engineering challenge. Both represent once-in-a-generation technological leaps. Trying to tackle both at the same time feels like hubris. If they just made great human-piloted electric cars and focused on cost, production efficiency, volume, and quality, I think they'd be in a better place as a business. Autopilot seems like an expensive distraction.

jchb 8y ago
The interior design of the Model 3 is very simple - there are few physical controls - with the assumption that the car usually does not need to be driven by a human. As Elon presented it: https://youtu.be/GZm8ckvsu9I?t=2m2s https://youtu.be/GZm8ckvsu9I?t=2m2s. Pure speculation: perhaps the simplified interior is necessary to bring the costs down for mass-production, and here is where the "synergy" with the autopilot comes in.

stretchwithme 8y ago

Job 1: Don't run into things.

kevinchen 8y ago

Tesla Autopilot should be recalled via the next OTA update. The “Autopilot” branding implies that users need not pay attention, when in reality, the system needs interventions at infrequent but hard-to-predict times. If an engineer at Apple can’t figure it out, then the average person has no chance. Their software sets users up to fail. (Where failure means permanent disability or death.) Inevitably, Musk fans will claim that recalling Autopilot actually makes Tesla drivers less safe. But here's the problem with Musk’s framing of Autopilot. Sure, maybe it fails less often than humans. (We don't know whether we can trust his numbers.) But we do know that when it fails, it fails in different ways — Autopilot crashes are noteworthy because they happen in situations where human drivers would have no problem. That’s what people can’t get over. And it is why Autopilot is such a dangerous feature. An automaker with more humility would’ve disabled this feature years ago. (Even Uber suspended testing after the Arizona crash!) With Musk, my fear is that more people will have to die before there is enough pressure from regulators / the public to pull the plug.

Traubenfuchs 8y ago
> But we do know that when it fails, it fails in different Oh the hubris of man. I am not even a Tesla fan, but still. "I'd rather have 2 of 100 people drive against a wall instead of 1 of 100 automatic cars driving against a wall.", that's what you are essentially saying, no?

jhanschoo 8y ago

Here's a relevant video that shows autopilot directing a Tesla into lane split. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QCF8tVqM3I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QCF8tVqM3I

deaps 8y ago

I think one of my main concerns with "autopilot" is that for a lot of drivers, it will absolutely make the roads safer for them and those that use the roads around them. Consequently, for some safer and more-alert drivers, it has the potential to make driving less safe.

dre85 8y ago

I wonder what percentage of owners actually have the courage to turn on autopilot? How many people here would/do?