10 ms·

It took seven miles to pull over a Tesla with a seemingly asleep driver

103 points by okket 8y ago

BlackLotus89 8y ago
Am I the only one thinking of the first episode of knight rider? Where Michael Knight fell asleep while driving and had to prentend he was a deaf guy with a bad neck.
masonic 8y ago
"The driver was Alexander Samek, who serves on the Los Altos Planning Commission."
primitivesuave 8y ago
I wonder, does having a car with autopilot make someone more likely to drive drunk, or is it simply averting an asleep-at-the-wheel car crash for the drunk drivers fortunate enough to have this feature?
- gronne 8y ago
  Probably both.
walrus01 8y ago
Maybe he wedged an orange in the steering wheel. https://youtu.be/TYZrehVQouc https://youtu.be/TYZrehVQouc
nikofeyn 8y ago
i still can't believe tesla has gotten away with putting a feature called auto-pilot into a car which does no such thing. how does auto-pilot mean driver must be alert at all times with hands physically at the wheel? how is the marketing and naming of that feature legal and passing regulation? and i don't like the overly positive implication that auto-pilot saved this person's life. no, in fact, its existence, as described in a separate incident in the exact same article, likely encouraged the drunk driving in the first place. a car just free running on the road with no one behind the wheel is not a good thing. seven miles is a long time to stop the car and endangered many other people's lives just as an active drunk driver would. auto-pilot did not improve the situation as the article implies.
- s_m_t 8y ago
  Isn't the autopilot in a tesla pretty similar to what is called autopilot in an airplane?
  - nikofeyn 8y ago
    that is a possibility, but there are key differences that come to mind. one is the different environments. two, the commercial airline pilots are working when using auto-pilot. they are flying the airplane via automation and are still very active in working with the plane and computer systems. they are still performing their jobs. of course, there are still issues, for example the recent boeing plane crash. but to me, it isn't comparable to the tesla situation, especially given the apparent idiocy of tesla owners who have completely bought into the hype compared to professional pilots who actually remain active in flying the plane.
    - tc313 8y ago
      But in terms of the appropriateness of calling the feature “autopilot,” it seems that Tesla’s feature is as deserving of the name as an airplane’s autopilot (the driver/pilot still has to remain alert and focused on what’s happening).
      - Xylakant 8y ago
        So what you’re implying is that Tesla uses the misguided notion that many people have about the capabilities of an airplane autopilot to promote a feature that doesn’t behave as people expect?
        diydsp 8y ago
        after experiencing this line of inquiry on many forums, yes, that is consensus. autopilot is the lane guidance of the skies that maintains basic stability not a level 5 system. people hear autopilot and think it means it does "everything." further muddying the waters, tesla maintains their car has all the hardware, sensors and computation to support fully autonomous driving. it's just that pesky software missing.
fingerlocks 8y ago
>“The situation is a bit of a puzzle because Autopilot is supposed to detect if a driver's hands are on the wheel and disengage if they're not.” Lack of information in these still-developing stories makes for some entertaining discussion. We can conjure up all sorts of theories to explain the unexpected phenomena. I think the sleeping driver was slouched against the wheel and engaging the two-hand steering touch sensor.
cedricium 8y ago
An article with a little more information: https://mv-voice.com/news/2018/11/30/los-altos-planning-commissioner-arrested-for-tesla-dui https://mv-voice.com/news/2018/11/30/los-altos-planning-comm...
rmason 8y ago
My grandfather was fond of telling me about drunks who'd get into their buggy and trust their horse to take them home. I don't think we're too far away from being able to do that with self-driving cars as long as you have the presence of mind to say Google - Home. Society has to decide whether that is a good thing or not.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Horses have pretty good collision avoidance, but even they have a false positive problem; they're easily spooked by flapping plastic bags and other unexpected movement in their visual field.
- lwansbrough 8y ago
  I’d imaging getting hit by a buggy carried a significantly lower risk of fatality. Not to mention a horse is a better computer than a Tesla. But I agree with your conclusion of course.
  - Sharlin 8y ago
    Not to mention there was significantly less buggy traffic than there’s car traffic today.
  - azernik 8y ago
    I think maybe that should be a goal for "strong AI" - not human intelligence, just the intelligence of a semi-smart animal.
    - slx26 8y ago
      well, that's still almost as complicated as human intelligence. the only main part that's missing is language. and to be fair, although human natural languages are really tricky, you could easily build communicative, natural-like languages that computers can handle (similar in appearance to simplified english). in any case, if you are solving learning, which is needed for a semi-smart animal intelligence, you probably wouldn't be far away from solving language. we are very semi-smart ourselves
bertil 8y ago
I’m not sure how much of a libertarian Elon Musk is, but similar stories would give voice to demand that Telsas be able to recognise a Police car flagging you, and pulling up safely unless over-ridden to keep on by the driver.
ryanmarsh 8y ago
This Tesla saved the life of a driver who fell asleep (drunk) behind the wheel, as well as the lives of others on the road around it. Having seen first hand what often happens when people do that I don’t understand what everyone’s complaining about. People drink and drive. It’s a huge problem in this country. If Tesla autopilot made him drive drunk then needle exchanges promote drug use. You can’t have it both way folks. It’s either a public safety issue or it’s not.
- aw3c2 8y ago
  If a car is "intelligent" enough to drive, it should be able to refuse to transport a drunk driver too.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    Unless it’s a taxi, right? I mean, when I catch a taxi home after I’ve been drinking, I’m not the driver, so your point stands. But if the car really could self drive then it could be a selfdriving taxi?
  - bertil 8y ago
    That option was tried: a company developed a safety system on top of a car’s ignition. To start, the driver had to blow into an alcohol test. It was meant for parents’ letting their teenagers drive their car and court-mandates. The system was rapidly scraped when people realise someone else could easily blow in.
    - lttlrck 8y ago
      Parents feeling the need to install these things seems misguided at best. But IID are in use all over the world and Universal IID hasn’t got far - as you’d expect. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignition_interlock_device https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignition_interlock_device
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  I upvoted your comment because it’s a reasonable position to take, in my opinion. I guess the down voters are probably wondering what would have happened if nobody tried to stop the vehicle. The obvious thing to do is slow down and stop in front of it, unless the car wound then change lanes out of the way. That’s a worrying thought. I tend to agree with your sentiment, at least in the future tense: self driving cars could, at least theoretically, drive sleeping / inebriated / injured people. We’re probably not there yet, and I don’t believe Tesla advertise this as a feature.
CodeWriter23 8y ago
FFS, summon a Lyft/Uber.
Animats 8y ago
Well, the "hands on wheel, driver paying attention" detection system clearly wasn't effective. Fortunately he was headed north on US 101, not south. Seven miles ending in Palo Alto means he went through the 101-85 interchange where a Tesla hit the divider barrier and killed the driver. But that shallow-angle split is southbound only. Northbound, you can go seven miles to Palo Alto without any unusual offramps that would confuse Tesla's lane-follower. Tesla's lane follower is pretty good. That's what creates the illusion that it can self-drive. Car-ahead detection, reasonably good. Obstacle detection, not so good. So the CHP did the right thing, boxing it in with their patrol cars and slowing down. It would have been much worse if they'd set up a roadblock.
- XJOKOLAT 8y ago
  A roadblock ... LMAO .... HN commenters must be getting progressivly more thick. Is what I would have said.
- dogma1138 8y ago
  I wonder how much longer is it going to be until we get a regulatory required pull over signal for autonomous systems and how in the hell you would secure it considering it would need to be used by countless law enforcement agencies world wide and would need to be implemented by multiple manufacturers. I’m pretty sure it would be some emergency stop button in the cabbin at first but then someone somewhere would want to pass a law that would enable the police to remotely initiate it.
  - vbezhenar 8y ago
    It'll allow criminals to intercept and kill drivers in empty roads, not very good solution. At least driver should be able to disable this system.
    - k_sh 8y ago
      A "law enforcement has requested that your car pull over automatically, press here if you don't want this to happen" dialog would serve the need here while also protecting passengers from bad actors.
wetpaws 8y ago
This is so surreal. Just imagine reading about something like this five or ten years ago.
mtw 8y ago
Tesla should be rename Autopilot to Auto-cruise Lane guidance. However this would have ended more dramatically if the driver had a car from another brand (except a Waymo, in which case he wouldn't be at the driver's seat)
sbhn 8y ago
Sounds like the answer is giving the police a special button that can take control of the car and pull it over automatically
- imron 8y ago
  Please no.
- ashleyn 8y ago
  All they need to do is box it in, and if it's functioning properly, it will stop itself.
- cdolan 8y ago
  This would be the worst answer. Technology like that will certainly be abused.
- benjaminjackman 8y ago
  Do any cars pull themselves over when they detect flashing emergency vehicle lights? That would’ve probably worked here and might be the ultimate answer.
bfung 8y ago
I upvoted an unpopular opinion, and I think it's worth reiterating. The autopilot feature in this case probably saved the guy's life and other drivers around him - if he was drunk, his decision to drive probably wasn't based on autopilot anyways.
- crisdux 8y ago
  You are making way too many assumptions here for my taste. It's easy for me to assume that having autopilot probably did influence his decision to drink and drive.
- BoorishBears 8y ago
  How would lane keep assist and automatic emergency braking, both of which would have triggered at the first hint of being tired with very strong alerts: a) not have saved his life b) not encouraged him to rely on them to make up for his current state Now a basic Corolla will detect that you’re sleepy and encourage you to pull over if it has to intervene often enough. Autopilot is a step backwards from systems like this.
- mikeash 8y ago
  People think the alternate headline is “man drives home safely.” It’s actually “it took 700 feet for a sleeping driver to crash.”
Rodneyj 8y ago
Can someone do a public records request for the dash cam and body cam? I'd love to see this and what the driver had to say
lostmsu 8y ago
And that never happened before?

103 points by okket 8y ago

Am I the only one thinking of the first episode of knight rider? Where Michael Knight fell asleep while driving and had to prentend he was a deaf guy with a bad neck.

masonic 8y ago

"The driver was Alexander Samek, who serves on the Los Altos Planning Commission."

primitivesuave 8y ago

I wonder, does having a car with autopilot make someone more likely to drive drunk, or is it simply averting an asleep-at-the-wheel car crash for the drunk drivers fortunate enough to have this feature?

gronne 8y ago
Probably both.

walrus01 8y ago

Maybe he wedged an orange in the steering wheel. https://youtu.be/TYZrehVQouc https://youtu.be/TYZrehVQouc

nikofeyn 8y ago

i still can't believe tesla has gotten away with putting a feature called auto-pilot into a car which does no such thing. how does auto-pilot mean driver must be alert at all times with hands physically at the wheel? how is the marketing and naming of that feature legal and passing regulation? and i don't like the overly positive implication that auto-pilot saved this person's life. no, in fact, its existence, as described in a separate incident in the exact same article, likely encouraged the drunk driving in the first place. a car just free running on the road with no one behind the wheel is not a good thing. seven miles is a long time to stop the car and endangered many other people's lives just as an active drunk driver would. auto-pilot did not improve the situation as the article implies.

s_m_t 8y ago
Isn't the autopilot in a tesla pretty similar to what is called autopilot in an airplane?
- nikofeyn 8y ago
  that is a possibility, but there are key differences that come to mind. one is the different environments. two, the commercial airline pilots are working when using auto-pilot. they are flying the airplane via automation and are still very active in working with the plane and computer systems. they are still performing their jobs. of course, there are still issues, for example the recent boeing plane crash. but to me, it isn't comparable to the tesla situation, especially given the apparent idiocy of tesla owners who have completely bought into the hype compared to professional pilots who actually remain active in flying the plane.
  - tc313 8y ago
    But in terms of the appropriateness of calling the feature “autopilot,” it seems that Tesla’s feature is as deserving of the name as an airplane’s autopilot (the driver/pilot still has to remain alert and focused on what’s happening).
    - Xylakant 8y ago
      So what you’re implying is that Tesla uses the misguided notion that many people have about the capabilities of an airplane autopilot to promote a feature that doesn’t behave as people expect?
      - diydsp 8y ago
        after experiencing this line of inquiry on many forums, yes, that is consensus. autopilot is the lane guidance of the skies that maintains basic stability not a level 5 system. people hear autopilot and think it means it does "everything." further muddying the waters, tesla maintains their car has all the hardware, sensors and computation to support fully autonomous driving. it's just that pesky software missing.

fingerlocks 8y ago

>“The situation is a bit of a puzzle because Autopilot is supposed to detect if a driver's hands are on the wheel and disengage if they're not.” Lack of information in these still-developing stories makes for some entertaining discussion. We can conjure up all sorts of theories to explain the unexpected phenomena. I think the sleeping driver was slouched against the wheel and engaging the two-hand steering touch sensor.

cedricium 8y ago

An article with a little more information: https://mv-voice.com/news/2018/11/30/los-altos-planning-commissioner-arrested-for-tesla-dui https://mv-voice.com/news/2018/11/30/los-altos-planning-comm...

rmason 8y ago

My grandfather was fond of telling me about drunks who'd get into their buggy and trust their horse to take them home. I don't think we're too far away from being able to do that with self-driving cars as long as you have the presence of mind to say Google - Home. Society has to decide whether that is a good thing or not.

pjc50 8y ago
Horses have pretty good collision avoidance, but even they have a false positive problem; they're easily spooked by flapping plastic bags and other unexpected movement in their visual field.
lwansbrough 8y ago
I’d imaging getting hit by a buggy carried a significantly lower risk of fatality. Not to mention a horse is a better computer than a Tesla. But I agree with your conclusion of course.
- Sharlin 8y ago
  Not to mention there was significantly less buggy traffic than there’s car traffic today.
- azernik 8y ago
  I think maybe that should be a goal for "strong AI" - not human intelligence, just the intelligence of a semi-smart animal.
  - slx26 8y ago
    well, that's still almost as complicated as human intelligence. the only main part that's missing is language. and to be fair, although human natural languages are really tricky, you could easily build communicative, natural-like languages that computers can handle (similar in appearance to simplified english). in any case, if you are solving learning, which is needed for a semi-smart animal intelligence, you probably wouldn't be far away from solving language. we are very semi-smart ourselves

bertil 8y ago

I’m not sure how much of a libertarian Elon Musk is, but similar stories would give voice to demand that Telsas be able to recognise a Police car flagging you, and pulling up safely unless over-ridden to keep on by the driver.

ryanmarsh 8y ago

This Tesla saved the life of a driver who fell asleep (drunk) behind the wheel, as well as the lives of others on the road around it. Having seen first hand what often happens when people do that I don’t understand what everyone’s complaining about. People drink and drive. It’s a huge problem in this country. If Tesla autopilot made him drive drunk then needle exchanges promote drug use. You can’t have it both way folks. It’s either a public safety issue or it’s not.

aw3c2 8y ago
If a car is "intelligent" enough to drive, it should be able to refuse to transport a drunk driver too.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  Unless it’s a taxi, right? I mean, when I catch a taxi home after I’ve been drinking, I’m not the driver, so your point stands. But if the car really could self drive then it could be a selfdriving taxi?
- bertil 8y ago
  That option was tried: a company developed a safety system on top of a car’s ignition. To start, the driver had to blow into an alcohol test. It was meant for parents’ letting their teenagers drive their car and court-mandates. The system was rapidly scraped when people realise someone else could easily blow in.
  - lttlrck 8y ago
    Parents feeling the need to install these things seems misguided at best. But IID are in use all over the world and Universal IID hasn’t got far - as you’d expect. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignition_interlock_device https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignition_interlock_device
TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
I upvoted your comment because it’s a reasonable position to take, in my opinion. I guess the down voters are probably wondering what would have happened if nobody tried to stop the vehicle. The obvious thing to do is slow down and stop in front of it, unless the car wound then change lanes out of the way. That’s a worrying thought. I tend to agree with your sentiment, at least in the future tense: self driving cars could, at least theoretically, drive sleeping / inebriated / injured people. We’re probably not there yet, and I don’t believe Tesla advertise this as a feature.

CodeWriter23 8y ago

FFS, summon a Lyft/Uber.

Animats 8y ago

Well, the "hands on wheel, driver paying attention" detection system clearly wasn't effective. Fortunately he was headed north on US 101, not south. Seven miles ending in Palo Alto means he went through the 101-85 interchange where a Tesla hit the divider barrier and killed the driver. But that shallow-angle split is southbound only. Northbound, you can go seven miles to Palo Alto without any unusual offramps that would confuse Tesla's lane-follower. Tesla's lane follower is pretty good. That's what creates the illusion that it can self-drive. Car-ahead detection, reasonably good. Obstacle detection, not so good. So the CHP did the right thing, boxing it in with their patrol cars and slowing down. It would have been much worse if they'd set up a roadblock.

XJOKOLAT 8y ago
A roadblock ... LMAO .... HN commenters must be getting progressivly more thick. Is what I would have said.
dogma1138 8y ago
I wonder how much longer is it going to be until we get a regulatory required pull over signal for autonomous systems and how in the hell you would secure it considering it would need to be used by countless law enforcement agencies world wide and would need to be implemented by multiple manufacturers. I’m pretty sure it would be some emergency stop button in the cabbin at first but then someone somewhere would want to pass a law that would enable the police to remotely initiate it.
- vbezhenar 8y ago
  It'll allow criminals to intercept and kill drivers in empty roads, not very good solution. At least driver should be able to disable this system.
  - k_sh 8y ago
    A "law enforcement has requested that your car pull over automatically, press here if you don't want this to happen" dialog would serve the need here while also protecting passengers from bad actors.

wetpaws 8y ago

This is so surreal. Just imagine reading about something like this five or ten years ago.

mtw 8y ago

Tesla should be rename Autopilot to Auto-cruise Lane guidance. However this would have ended more dramatically if the driver had a car from another brand (except a Waymo, in which case he wouldn't be at the driver's seat)

sbhn 8y ago

Sounds like the answer is giving the police a special button that can take control of the car and pull it over automatically

imron 8y ago
Please no.
ashleyn 8y ago
All they need to do is box it in, and if it's functioning properly, it will stop itself.
cdolan 8y ago
This would be the worst answer. Technology like that will certainly be abused.
benjaminjackman 8y ago
Do any cars pull themselves over when they detect flashing emergency vehicle lights? That would’ve probably worked here and might be the ultimate answer.

bfung 8y ago

I upvoted an unpopular opinion, and I think it's worth reiterating. The autopilot feature in this case probably saved the guy's life and other drivers around him - if he was drunk, his decision to drive probably wasn't based on autopilot anyways.

crisdux 8y ago
You are making way too many assumptions here for my taste. It's easy for me to assume that having autopilot probably did influence his decision to drink and drive.
BoorishBears 8y ago
How would lane keep assist and automatic emergency braking, both of which would have triggered at the first hint of being tired with very strong alerts: a) not have saved his life b) not encouraged him to rely on them to make up for his current state Now a basic Corolla will detect that you’re sleepy and encourage you to pull over if it has to intervene often enough. Autopilot is a step backwards from systems like this.
mikeash 8y ago
People think the alternate headline is “man drives home safely.” It’s actually “it took 700 feet for a sleeping driver to crash.”

Rodneyj 8y ago

Can someone do a public records request for the dash cam and body cam? I'd love to see this and what the driver had to say

lostmsu 8y ago

And that never happened before?