10 ms·

Tesla's blog post: https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/blog/update-last-week’s-accident https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/blog/update-last-week’s-accident the driver’s hands

Tesla's blog post: https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/blog/update-last-week’s-accident https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/blog/update-last-week’s-accident the driver’s hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision. The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider Looks like sensors failed to see concrete divider in nice sunny weather and car slammed in to it at 70mph. Driver was obviously over confident on system's ability to self-drive, probably busy looking at phone and ignored warnings to put his hands on steering. In the US, there is one automotive fatality every 86 million miles across all vehicles from all manufacturers. For Tesla, there is one fatality, including known pedestrian fatalities, every 320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware. If you are driving a Tesla equipped with Autopilot hardware, you are 3.7 times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident. These stats don't help when you read the guy had two kids who will now grow up fatherless for rest of their lives. Humans killing humans is very different thing than machines killing humans even if the fatality rates are 10X lower. Companies need to aggressively enforce, both hands on steering until self-driving is really really really good.

ehnto 8y ago
I agree with your conclusion, but the compassion angle isn't helpful in discerning whether or not it is truly safer, and every fatality is a human death and can be just as impactul to others. This guy is no different to the 3.7x more people per mile who have died in other vehicles, so where is the concern toward those manufacturers? What are they doing wrong that their fatality rate is so much higher? If turning off automated features in a Tesla would lead to more deaths would that still be the right thing to do? At some point in automations progress this will become the Trolley Problem thought experiment, with one side being "Five people die but it was their own fault" and the other side is "One person dies but a machine did it" and we will have to decide which is morally correct.
- roenxi 8y ago
  The moral issues will get swamped by practical ones pretty quickly. Driving while checking a phone is illegal in most jurisdictions I'm aware of. Humans driving cars could eventually be seen in a similar light - there is no defense of choosing to drive yourself if a machine that is statistically better than you was available to do the job. It would literally be endangering other road users. And it isn't clear why a rational driver would choose to drive themselves anyway, other options being available. The only blockers are (1) how good are computers really? and (2) how much extra does it cost?
rolleiflex 8y ago
I'm paraphrasing from the last time this was posted, but Tesla's words need to be read very carefully. What they say is: > the driver’s hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision What Tesla does not say is that the six seconds the driver's hands were not on the wheel was immediately preceding the crash. It is any six seconds before the crash. Admittedly this is a very dark reading, however, this reading is supported by their further claims that the driver 'had multiple warnings', which was in fact fifteen minutes ago, and for an unrelated event. This is the kind of sketchiness that makes people wary of Tesla. Funny thing is, they make cool tech, they don't need to do any of this, nor things like discounting the 'gas savings' from the sticker price. I genuinely don't understand where their apparent need for pushing the definition of truth to its breaking point is coming from. Had they not openly misrepresented their autopilots' capabilities, they wouldn't have lie in this bed of their own making now.
- pteraspidomorph 8y ago
  That's not what I read in this article. > Huang’s hands were detected on the steering wheel only 34 seconds during the last minute before impact. If during the last minute before impact the hands were missing for any 26 seconds, then it makes no sense to say that they were missing for any 6 seconds. The 6 seconds can only be consecutive before the impact, right?
- unityByFreedom 8y ago
  > I genuinely don't understand where their apparent need for pushing the definition of truth to its breaking point is coming from. One theory is Musk has been misrepresenting the company's products for years in order to keep the valuation high, and he's now dug the hole so deep he can't find a way out.
- FartyMcFarter 8y ago
  They are still misreprenting their self-driving capabilities in their marketing materials: https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/autopilot?redirect=no https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/autopilot?redirect=no In the beginning of this video there's the caption "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself." If the lawyers in this lawsuit are any good they will have a field day with this.
TomMckenny 8y ago
The other fatalities and subsequent orphans, of which there are vastly more, don't get ratings and don't offend a bevy of long standing sponsors.
garmaine 8y ago
> Humans killing humans is very different thing than machines killing humans even if the fatality rates are 10X lower. So it is better for 10 humans to die at the hands of other humans, than one machine caused death? In what moral framework is that true?
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  It's a public acceptance issue, not a moral issue.
hef19898 8y ago
Regarding the second paragraph from Tesla the interesting numbers would be fatalities per driven mile without autopilot engaged vs miles with autopilot engaged. Just being equipped with autopilot doesn't tell anything in that regard.
- unityByFreedom 8y ago
  > the interesting numbers would be fatalities per driven mile without autopilot engaged vs miles with autopilot engaged Exactly. I imagine hell freezes over before we see such data. Tesla did not even provide complete data to NHTSA [1] [1] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26455/nhtsas-flawed-autopilot-safety-study-unmasked https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26455/nhtsas-flawed-autopilot-...
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> In the US, there is one automotive fatality every 86 million miles across all vehicles from all manufacturers. For Tesla, there is one fatality, including known pedestrian fatalities, every 320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware. If you are driving a Tesla equipped with Autopilot hardware, you are 3.7 times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident. HN's Contrarian Skeptics Brigade can correct me on this (I repent!), but I think this is not very different than saying: "10 out of all 100 people get this disease. We tested this hand-picked group of 10 people and found that only 1 of them had it. This small group is ten times more healthy than the general population!" The number of Tesla cars with Autopilot in circulation must certainly be a small fraction of all vehicles on US roads (including bicycles, etc). It makes sense that, if you look for an event in a smaller population you should expect to see it happening in a different rate than in a larger population - for the same reason that if you toss a coin ten times and count the proportion of heads it may well be different than 0.5, but if you toss it one million times you're much more likely to see it landing heads half of the time. More observations allow you to better estimate the true distribution of events.
- masklinn 8y ago
  I do think the way they use the statistic is probably misleading and at last non-trivial to compare, but FWIW the ratio of in-vehicle versus non-vehicle casualties is about 10:1 in the US, and the statistic is for motor vehicles, so bicycles would either not be included (if they fell off the road) or would be part of the non-vehicle casualties alongside pedestrians.
- tim333 8y ago
  I think that particular statistical issue is not that relevant. There are others - if you compare Teslas to other luxury cars they have more fatalities for example. The Tesla fatality data is likely incomplete. The autopilots tend to get used on freeways which have much lower fatalities than town driving. And I'm sure some more. (Here's an article pointing out flaws and suggesting Tesla's death rate is about 3x comparable luxury cars https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/teslas-driver-fatality-rate-is-more-than-triple-that-of-luxury-cars-and-likely-even-higher-433670ddde17 https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/teslas-driver-fatality-r...) On the other hand I think people mostly know the score. I'm sure the driver in this crash knew he should have been looking and autopilot was not 100% reliable. I enjoy riding motorcycles which have a stupid high death rate compared with cars. It's a free world to some extent.
afterburner 8y ago
Lowering the overall odds of a crash may not be enough if the few accidents happen in circumstances that a human driver would have absolutely no trouble with.
- mgoetzke 8y ago
  Agreed, but a number of these accidents on dividers had previous accidents on the exact same spots with human drivers. So humans do have trouble with it. I would also like to point out, that dividers like these are dangerous in of themselves. There should never be knife-like intrusions into the driving space on a high speed road of any kind. They are also quite uncessary, a few simple left right signs that bend over when you drive over them followed by basically grass would have been a much better outcome. That being said it is still tragic.
  - toast0 8y ago
    This exit is a left hand exit for an HOV only ramp that originates a different freeway. The interchange is in the middle of a built out suburban area; there's no room for a grassy divider. From experience driving around it, humans get dangerously close to the divider due to trying to change lanes much too late -- either into or out of the exit lane, often with a significant amount of braking. Durable cones separating the lanes might be an option, but would add significant maintenance expense. The Tesla in question collided with the obstacle while its automation was attempting to maintain a lane, and because the automation detected that the car ahead had moved out of the lane, it also accelerated into the divider. I seriously doubt many (or any) human drivers would misinterpret the position of the lane in this manner at this exit, especially given the conditions (clear day, sun high avoiding glare) despite the poor striping in the area.
jankotek 8y ago
> Driver was obviously over confident on system's ability to self-drive That thing is called "auto-pilot". If its purpose is not to self drive a car, maybe it should be renamed.
- Bombthecat 8y ago
  It could be called assisted driving and still people will use it like auto pilot. I had an Opel company car for two years, full of tech (lane assist, auto break, sign detection etc etc etc) after a year and a half I realized how much I relied on this stuff (hint way way too much!) our brains are wired in a way to do as much as possible with as little attention as possible...
  - abbe_k 8y ago
    That might be the case but Tesla is still pushing for people to see it as autopilot when it obviously isn't.
mnl 8y ago
>In the US, there is one automotive fatality every 86 million miles across all vehicles from all manufacturers. For Tesla, there is one fatality, including known pedestrian fatalities, every 320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware. If you are driving a Tesla equipped with Autopilot hardware, you are 3.7 times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident. I didn't know Tesla sold motorbikes too. Why do they still do this? What's the point if not trying to mislead the public?
- nolok 8y ago
  > Why do they still do this? What's the point if not trying to mislead the public? You're answering your own question there; they're doing it not with assumed evil intent ("let's lie about the safeties so that people kill themselves ! meuahahah") but for PR and stock reasons, but it ends up being the same result: they want people to see autopilot as "it drives for you" if you're a car buyer or an investor, but they also want people to see it as "it's just a helper, it doesn't drive you need to drive" if you're a regulatory agency, a judge or a customer that got into a crash. As for the stats comparison removing motorbikes is a big one sure, but you could go one step further and take into account only the miles on free/highway and let's compare it again, because if the US is anything like here in France most accident are in the 15 Km around the drivers' home (probably because the driver feel "safer" because he knows the road) and that's also when autopilot is the least likely to be on. Meaning they're comparing themselves with a lot of miles where they're not competing. And even further than that, no matter how safe/unsafe you are, if all your crash ends up with "the driver should have been handling the wheel but wasn't" then it doesn't mean all those drivers did it wrong, for me it's more a case of "you disengage/safety system is incapable of handling a case that's causing fatalities yet is common enough that all your crash report point at it".
  - cromulent 8y ago
    It's a terrible comparison, that's for sure. The figure they quote (1 per 86 million miles) is for all vehicles (including bicycles). Only 37% of those deaths came from passenger vehicles. Additionally, the Tesla cohort is really modern high-safety passenger vehicles IMO. A < 5 year old passenger vehicle with stability control, etc could easily be statistically as safe as a Tesla.
pfortuny 8y ago
That statistic is so so so misleading... It is akin to blatantly lying.
- mkagenius 8y ago
  Even if true, the miles accrued for others is over a period of 10 years (when there were less safe infra.) while tesla self drive is recent and hence not statistically significant.
  - pfortuny 8y ago
    Yes, and for any type of car (v.gr. if you only included two types of Mercedes or, say Lexus, then you might get something totally different...). Cannot say that I am shocked, though.
hyperbovine 8y ago
“Equipped with” is not the same as “while using”. What’s that stat? They probably know it.
- tapland 8y ago
  If you disconnect it just before slamming into a wall at 80 mph the driver was at fault. //Tesla I really want one, but trust erodes at record speed with this kind of cherry picked and misleading claims.
adrr 8y ago
Tesla hand detection doesn't indicate that the driver didn't have their hands on the wheel. It detects if you applying torque to the wheel in a direction. Also the Tesla fatality stat is them playing with numbers. Majority of fatalities happen where autopilot wouldn't be used. Only 15% of fatalities happen on the freeway and highways. I bet that number goes to single digits with pedestrian deaths. https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/roadway-and-environment/fatalityfacts/fixed-object-crashes/2009 https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/roadway-and-environment/f...
- aiyodev 8y ago
  I think the bigger issue is that Tesla would rather lie than accept responsibility and work to improve the problem. I would never trust a company like this with my life.
  - Ulrich1 8y ago
    Tesla is improving Autopilot all the time.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      Except when it regresses. See 'Tesla hit truck broadside'.
- rightnow 8y ago
  You dont know this. The UI only displays when torque is applied in a direction, but you dont actually know if Tesla detects it earlier or not.
zuzun 8y ago
> ignored warnings to put his hands on steering If there were any. One of the claims in the lawsuit is "failure to warn" and the preliminary report of the NTSP says "the alerts were made more than 15 minutes before the crash".
- sjwright 8y ago
  The idea that the driver didn't know he was supposed to have his hands on the wheel while using autopilot seems ridiculous. Anyone who has used autopilot knows that failure to keep the hands on the wheel results in a warning. We do know he received warnings. And we can strongly infer that he knew how to actively avoid receiving warnings. Therefore I can't possibly fathom how Tesla could be responsible for a "failure to warn".
dubyah 8y ago
The problem with the no hands-on-steering-wheel detection claim Tesla keeps bringing up is that it's quite fallible and not as conclusive as they insist. A light touch(like one might expect while driving a freeway with cruise control and lane-keep assist, for example) may not provide enough torque for the sensor to detect it. Plenty of people have complained about it in the past. https://forums.teslarati.com/threads/hands-on-the-wheel-detection.4927/ https://forums.teslarati.com/threads/hands-on-the-wheel-dete... https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/hands-on-steering-wheel-detection-during-ap.99671/ https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/hands-on-steering-wh... https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/tesla-autopilot-not-sensing-hands-steering-wheel https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/tesla-autopilot-not-se...
- sjwright 8y ago
  > The problem with the no hands-on-steering-wheel detection claim Tesla keeps bringing up I don't get why it matters. Why is Tesla's responsibility greater or lesser based on the position of the driver's hands? The driver could have had one hand on the wheel while mousing around on a laptop with the other. Or he could have been intensely focused on the road ahead with his hands resting on his legs, inches away from the wheel. I'm neither defending nor attacking Tesla here, because I don't think I have sufficient information to have an opinion either way. But I'm pretty sure that learning the answer to this particular question wouldn't have any bearing on any opinion I might eventually form.
  - rightbyte 8y ago
    It's a dead man switch. If the dead man switch is not working it's a system malfunction.
    - sjwright 8y ago
      That might be technically true, but it's irrelevant. Nowhere does Tesla ever describe it to the customer as a dead man switch. And it wasn't malfunctioning. He wasn't a dead man. He was very much alive, understood the warnings, understood that the car expected him to keep his hands on the wheel and keep paying attention to the road. He understood the warnings so well that he was capable of avoiding them with such proficiency that he did not receive one for 15 minutes.
solveit 8y ago
> These stats don't help when you read the guy had two kids who will now grow up fatherless for rest of their lives. PRwise, yes. But it could've been 7.4 kids who would grow up fatherless for the rest of their lives.
chewyland 8y ago
Was adding the "kid" part integral to the reply? Made me cringe a bit.
Beldin 8y ago
Looks like sensors failed to see concrete divider in nice sunny weather and car slammed in to it at 70mph. Driver was obviously over confident on system's ability to self-drive, probably busy looking at phone and ignored warnings to put his hands on steering. Why would you trust the "hands-on-steer" sensors? There was a sensor problem, after all. No reason to trust the manufacturer when they claim these other sensors did work properly.
agumonkey 8y ago
The statistics argument is one the worst thing about Tesla. It's borderline immoral and most probably a PR blunder.
abalone 8y ago
> Driver was obviously over confident I wouldn’t assume that. Videos of this exact scenario prove that the reaction time required is on the order of a few seconds. Everything Tesla says here exaggerates driver culpability, like saying he received “multiple warnings” (15 minutes ago and completely unrelated). Don’t let that hypnotize you into thinking he was being irresponsible here. There may have been other factors at play such as getting blinded by the sun during those few critical seconds of Autopilot error.
- tim333 8y ago
  If you look at the videos here of a tesla going for a barrier there seems to be about 3 seconds between seeing it's going the wrong way and potential impact. Which is enough time if you're expecting it but not long if it's a surprise https://np.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/b36x27/its_back_after_6_months_of_working_fine_2019515/ https://np.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/b36x27/its_back... (hn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19443925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19443925)
  - saalweachter 8y ago
    The short time frame to react to unexpected events is why, if you're a driver, your first response to any unexpected stimuli has to be to decelerate while you evaluate the situation. In turn, this is why tailgating is such a dangerous behavior.
- xvf22 8y ago
  A big issue is that this can surprise a driver since an update can change the car's behavior.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    Does it stand to reason that not only can an update change the cars behaviour, but that an update is likely to change the car’s behaviour.
capkutay 8y ago
> Driver was obviously over confident on system's ability to self-drive, probably busy looking at phone and ignored warnings to put his hands on steering. and based on personal experience, he was probably overconfident because the person who sold him that car was overconfident. i remember my first tesla autopilot test drive on a freeway...i was a bit nervous...constantly stepping in when i thought the car was tail-gating or not breaking fast enough and the salesman had a very nonchalant attitude as if I was being needlessly anxious about it.
BenFrantzDale 8y ago
I have to wonder what the fatality rate is among the Tesla demographic: those who have relatively new luxury cars.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>In the US, there is one automotive fatality every 86 million miles across all vehicles from all manufacturers. For Tesla, there is one fatality, including known pedestrian fatalities, every 320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware. If you are driving a Tesla equipped with Autopilot hardware, you are 3.7 times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident. This is a dishonest comparison. You're comparing the Tesla to an "average" that includes 1995 Corollas that will happily let a telephone pole into the cabin and 1999 Dodge Dakotas that will readily turn into a pancake if you put them on their roof. You're also comparing across economic classes and demographic groups. Your average Tesla owner is not going to be working 3rd shift or making a 100mi commute and consequently has a much lower chance of starting a small logging operation after falling asleep at the wheel or harvesting venison at high speed. Your average Tesla owner is also likely of an age where they're too old to be driving dangerously fast for conditions all the time but not yet old enough to be getting bad at driving. Basically the mean/mode Tesla owner is a wealthy-ish 30-something to 50-something man and that's a really safe demographic compared to the national average. If you want to make a fair comparison compare the Teslas models to other sedans of similar age and price.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- MeltySmelty 8y ago
  precisely. tesla is full of shit and musk needs to take a serious hike.
bufferoverflow 8y ago
It's unfair that Tesla would get sued for every death, but wouldn't get a comparable reward for every death it prevented.
- jfk13 8y ago
  But it's perhaps not unfair to sue them for misleading advertising that leads to people getting killed. "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself." creates very different expectations from "While the car is driving itself, the person in the driver's seat is keeping his hands on the steering wheel and his attention on the road at all times."
  - bufferoverflow 8y ago
    Doesn't Tesla push the second scenario at the moment?
    - jfk13 8y ago
      At https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/autopilot?redirect=no https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/autopilot?redirect=no, one of those quotes is presented as a full-screen caption at the beginning of the video near the top of the page. The other is found after scrolling down several screens. Which would you consider the more prominent message?
      - jfk13 8y ago
        (Just to clarify, the second message isn't actually present in the form of my suggested rephrasing; but the text that "Current Autopilot features require active driver supervision" is a long way down the page.)
    - jsight 8y ago
      They literally tell you to put your hands on the wheel and pay attention every time you don't, and sometimes even when you do. So yes, they push the idea that awareness is required.
TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
> Looks like sensors failed to see concrete divider in nice sunny weather and car slammed in to it at 70mph. This doesn’t sound right. Last time I looked in to this, Telsa’s software intentionally ignores station objects when the vehicle is traveling at speed. Has this changed?
dragonwriter 8y ago
So, Tesla's sensors failed to detect a concrete barrier and failed to detect he driver’s hands on the wheel, but we’re supposed to assume that the first which was clearly a manufacturing defect was not responsible for the crash because of the second which, we are to presume, must have accurately reflected reality. (Since California uses comparative fault in these kinds of cases, legally this would seem to at best reduce but not actually eliminate Tesla's liability, even were a jury to be convinced by it.) > If you are driving a Tesla equipped with Autopilot hardware, you are 3.7 times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident. Which I suspect says nothing about the vehicles (much less autopilot hardware specifically, and even less the autopilot function), and everything about the age demographics of Tesla owners, because age is a significant factor in accident rates, and there are probably disproportionately few teenagers and other very young drivers driving Teslas. https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuries-deaths-relation-driver-age-united-states-2014-2015/ https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuri...
gthtjtkt 8y ago
You're assuming "failed to detect hands" means that his hands were not on the wheel, which is 100% false. Tesla's have detection is extremely rudimentary and requires the driver to apply torque to the wheel on order to be "detected". You could be grasping the wheel hard enough to turn coal into diamonds and it STILL wouldn't detect your hands unless you move the wheel slightly.
sizzle 8y ago
They need to be aggressively fined until they stop using the term "auto pilot" which is highly disingenuous.
linsomniac 8y ago
Tesla has hammered on this "hands not detected on wheel for 6 seconds" point, but in my experience that doesn't mean anything. Tesla's "hand on wheel" detection is terrible. It basically only works if you have one hand on the wheel at the 2 or 10 o'clock position; you have to be slightly tugging on the wheel. But not TOO much or it disengages. I would usually drive, on long straight sections of the Interstate, with my hand at the 5 o'clock position, resting on my thigh and grasping the wheel. Very little steering input is necessary. But the Tesla always detects this as "hands not on wheel". Ditto if I have both my hands on the wheel, because the pulling force evens out between the left and right side of the wheel. I basically never drive without my hands on the wheel, but Tesla kind of always detects "hands not on wheel". Sometimes I notice it before it sounds the audio alert, but sometimes I don't.
rladd 8y ago
And they still don't work and are still driving at barriers! https://np.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/b36x27/its_back_after_6_months_of_working_fine_2019515/ https://np.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/b36x27/its_back...
Ntrails 8y ago
> Companies need to aggressively enforce, both hands on steering until self-driving is really really really good. Hands on the wheel is such a stupid metric. Two hands on the wheel whilst watching a film on an ipad doesn't do a damned thing. What matters is whether I'm paying attention, a much harder to measure metric. Am I looking at the road, judging distances, hazards, etc. I say this every time autopilots come up - I think it is impossible for a human to give up responsibility for reacting to 99.99% of input and still retain attention for the remaining 0.01%. I certainly don't believe I can do it, and don't intend to use a car that ever expects it.
- Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
  Chrysler/Cadillan has eye tracking - seems like exactly the thing you want. While it is in automatic driving mode, it tracks your eyes and if you are not looking at the road for an extended period of time, warnings are issued.

ehnto 8y ago

I agree with your conclusion, but the compassion angle isn't helpful in discerning whether or not it is truly safer, and every fatality is a human death and can be just as impactul to others. This guy is no different to the 3.7x more people per mile who have died in other vehicles, so where is the concern toward those manufacturers? What are they doing wrong that their fatality rate is so much higher? If turning off automated features in a Tesla would lead to more deaths would that still be the right thing to do? At some point in automations progress this will become the Trolley Problem thought experiment, with one side being "Five people die but it was their own fault" and the other side is "One person dies but a machine did it" and we will have to decide which is morally correct.

roenxi 8y ago
The moral issues will get swamped by practical ones pretty quickly. Driving while checking a phone is illegal in most jurisdictions I'm aware of. Humans driving cars could eventually be seen in a similar light - there is no defense of choosing to drive yourself if a machine that is statistically better than you was available to do the job. It would literally be endangering other road users. And it isn't clear why a rational driver would choose to drive themselves anyway, other options being available. The only blockers are (1) how good are computers really? and (2) how much extra does it cost?

rolleiflex 8y ago

I'm paraphrasing from the last time this was posted, but Tesla's words need to be read very carefully. What they say is: > the driver’s hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision What Tesla does not say is that the six seconds the driver's hands were not on the wheel was immediately preceding the crash. It is any six seconds before the crash. Admittedly this is a very dark reading, however, this reading is supported by their further claims that the driver 'had multiple warnings', which was in fact fifteen minutes ago, and for an unrelated event. This is the kind of sketchiness that makes people wary of Tesla. Funny thing is, they make cool tech, they don't need to do any of this, nor things like discounting the 'gas savings' from the sticker price. I genuinely don't understand where their apparent need for pushing the definition of truth to its breaking point is coming from. Had they not openly misrepresented their autopilots' capabilities, they wouldn't have lie in this bed of their own making now.

pteraspidomorph 8y ago
That's not what I read in this article. > Huang’s hands were detected on the steering wheel only 34 seconds during the last minute before impact. If during the last minute before impact the hands were missing for any 26 seconds, then it makes no sense to say that they were missing for any 6 seconds. The 6 seconds can only be consecutive before the impact, right?
unityByFreedom 8y ago
> I genuinely don't understand where their apparent need for pushing the definition of truth to its breaking point is coming from. One theory is Musk has been misrepresenting the company's products for years in order to keep the valuation high, and he's now dug the hole so deep he can't find a way out.
FartyMcFarter 8y ago
They are still misreprenting their self-driving capabilities in their marketing materials: https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/autopilot?redirect=no https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/autopilot?redirect=no In the beginning of this video there's the caption "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself." If the lawyers in this lawsuit are any good they will have a field day with this.

TomMckenny 8y ago

The other fatalities and subsequent orphans, of which there are vastly more, don't get ratings and don't offend a bevy of long standing sponsors.

garmaine 8y ago

> Humans killing humans is very different thing than machines killing humans even if the fatality rates are 10X lower. So it is better for 10 humans to die at the hands of other humans, than one machine caused death? In what moral framework is that true?

amanaplanacanal 8y ago
It's a public acceptance issue, not a moral issue.

hef19898 8y ago

Regarding the second paragraph from Tesla the interesting numbers would be fatalities per driven mile without autopilot engaged vs miles with autopilot engaged. Just being equipped with autopilot doesn't tell anything in that regard.

unityByFreedom 8y ago
> the interesting numbers would be fatalities per driven mile without autopilot engaged vs miles with autopilot engaged Exactly. I imagine hell freezes over before we see such data. Tesla did not even provide complete data to NHTSA [1] [1] https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26455/nhtsas-flawed-autopilot-safety-study-unmasked https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26455/nhtsas-flawed-autopilot-...

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> In the US, there is one automotive fatality every 86 million miles across all vehicles from all manufacturers. For Tesla, there is one fatality, including known pedestrian fatalities, every 320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware. If you are driving a Tesla equipped with Autopilot hardware, you are 3.7 times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident. HN's Contrarian Skeptics Brigade can correct me on this (I repent!), but I think this is not very different than saying: "10 out of all 100 people get this disease. We tested this hand-picked group of 10 people and found that only 1 of them had it. This small group is ten times more healthy than the general population!" The number of Tesla cars with Autopilot in circulation must certainly be a small fraction of all vehicles on US roads (including bicycles, etc). It makes sense that, if you look for an event in a smaller population you should expect to see it happening in a different rate than in a larger population - for the same reason that if you toss a coin ten times and count the proportion of heads it may well be different than 0.5, but if you toss it one million times you're much more likely to see it landing heads half of the time. More observations allow you to better estimate the true distribution of events.

masklinn 8y ago
I do think the way they use the statistic is probably misleading and at last non-trivial to compare, but FWIW the ratio of in-vehicle versus non-vehicle casualties is about 10:1 in the US, and the statistic is for motor vehicles, so bicycles would either not be included (if they fell off the road) or would be part of the non-vehicle casualties alongside pedestrians.
tim333 8y ago
I think that particular statistical issue is not that relevant. There are others - if you compare Teslas to other luxury cars they have more fatalities for example. The Tesla fatality data is likely incomplete. The autopilots tend to get used on freeways which have much lower fatalities than town driving. And I'm sure some more. (Here's an article pointing out flaws and suggesting Tesla's death rate is about 3x comparable luxury cars https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/teslas-driver-fatality-rate-is-more-than-triple-that-of-luxury-cars-and-likely-even-higher-433670ddde17 https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/teslas-driver-fatality-r...) On the other hand I think people mostly know the score. I'm sure the driver in this crash knew he should have been looking and autopilot was not 100% reliable. I enjoy riding motorcycles which have a stupid high death rate compared with cars. It's a free world to some extent.

afterburner 8y ago

Lowering the overall odds of a crash may not be enough if the few accidents happen in circumstances that a human driver would have absolutely no trouble with.

mgoetzke 8y ago
Agreed, but a number of these accidents on dividers had previous accidents on the exact same spots with human drivers. So humans do have trouble with it. I would also like to point out, that dividers like these are dangerous in of themselves. There should never be knife-like intrusions into the driving space on a high speed road of any kind. They are also quite uncessary, a few simple left right signs that bend over when you drive over them followed by basically grass would have been a much better outcome. That being said it is still tragic.
- toast0 8y ago
  This exit is a left hand exit for an HOV only ramp that originates a different freeway. The interchange is in the middle of a built out suburban area; there's no room for a grassy divider. From experience driving around it, humans get dangerously close to the divider due to trying to change lanes much too late -- either into or out of the exit lane, often with a significant amount of braking. Durable cones separating the lanes might be an option, but would add significant maintenance expense. The Tesla in question collided with the obstacle while its automation was attempting to maintain a lane, and because the automation detected that the car ahead had moved out of the lane, it also accelerated into the divider. I seriously doubt many (or any) human drivers would misinterpret the position of the lane in this manner at this exit, especially given the conditions (clear day, sun high avoiding glare) despite the poor striping in the area.

jankotek 8y ago

> Driver was obviously over confident on system's ability to self-drive That thing is called "auto-pilot". If its purpose is not to self drive a car, maybe it should be renamed.

Bombthecat 8y ago
It could be called assisted driving and still people will use it like auto pilot. I had an Opel company car for two years, full of tech (lane assist, auto break, sign detection etc etc etc) after a year and a half I realized how much I relied on this stuff (hint way way too much!) our brains are wired in a way to do as much as possible with as little attention as possible...
- abbe_k 8y ago
  That might be the case but Tesla is still pushing for people to see it as autopilot when it obviously isn't.

mnl 8y ago

nolok 8y ago
> Why do they still do this? What's the point if not trying to mislead the public? You're answering your own question there; they're doing it not with assumed evil intent ("let's lie about the safeties so that people kill themselves ! meuahahah") but for PR and stock reasons, but it ends up being the same result: they want people to see autopilot as "it drives for you" if you're a car buyer or an investor, but they also want people to see it as "it's just a helper, it doesn't drive you need to drive" if you're a regulatory agency, a judge or a customer that got into a crash. As for the stats comparison removing motorbikes is a big one sure, but you could go one step further and take into account only the miles on free/highway and let's compare it again, because if the US is anything like here in France most accident are in the 15 Km around the drivers' home (probably because the driver feel "safer" because he knows the road) and that's also when autopilot is the least likely to be on. Meaning they're comparing themselves with a lot of miles where they're not competing. And even further than that, no matter how safe/unsafe you are, if all your crash ends up with "the driver should have been handling the wheel but wasn't" then it doesn't mean all those drivers did it wrong, for me it's more a case of "you disengage/safety system is incapable of handling a case that's causing fatalities yet is common enough that all your crash report point at it".
- cromulent 8y ago
  It's a terrible comparison, that's for sure. The figure they quote (1 per 86 million miles) is for all vehicles (including bicycles). Only 37% of those deaths came from passenger vehicles. Additionally, the Tesla cohort is really modern high-safety passenger vehicles IMO. A < 5 year old passenger vehicle with stability control, etc could easily be statistically as safe as a Tesla.

pfortuny 8y ago

That statistic is so so so misleading... It is akin to blatantly lying.

mkagenius 8y ago
Even if true, the miles accrued for others is over a period of 10 years (when there were less safe infra.) while tesla self drive is recent and hence not statistically significant.
- pfortuny 8y ago
  Yes, and for any type of car (v.gr. if you only included two types of Mercedes or, say Lexus, then you might get something totally different...). Cannot say that I am shocked, though.

hyperbovine 8y ago

“Equipped with” is not the same as “while using”. What’s that stat? They probably know it.

tapland 8y ago
If you disconnect it just before slamming into a wall at 80 mph the driver was at fault. //Tesla I really want one, but trust erodes at record speed with this kind of cherry picked and misleading claims.

adrr 8y ago

Tesla hand detection doesn't indicate that the driver didn't have their hands on the wheel. It detects if you applying torque to the wheel in a direction. Also the Tesla fatality stat is them playing with numbers. Majority of fatalities happen where autopilot wouldn't be used. Only 15% of fatalities happen on the freeway and highways. I bet that number goes to single digits with pedestrian deaths. https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/roadway-and-environment/fatalityfacts/fixed-object-crashes/2009 https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/roadway-and-environment/f...

aiyodev 8y ago
I think the bigger issue is that Tesla would rather lie than accept responsibility and work to improve the problem. I would never trust a company like this with my life.
- Ulrich1 8y ago
  Tesla is improving Autopilot all the time.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    Except when it regresses. See 'Tesla hit truck broadside'.
rightnow 8y ago
You dont know this. The UI only displays when torque is applied in a direction, but you dont actually know if Tesla detects it earlier or not.

zuzun 8y ago

> ignored warnings to put his hands on steering If there were any. One of the claims in the lawsuit is "failure to warn" and the preliminary report of the NTSP says "the alerts were made more than 15 minutes before the crash".

sjwright 8y ago
The idea that the driver didn't know he was supposed to have his hands on the wheel while using autopilot seems ridiculous. Anyone who has used autopilot knows that failure to keep the hands on the wheel results in a warning. We do know he received warnings. And we can strongly infer that he knew how to actively avoid receiving warnings. Therefore I can't possibly fathom how Tesla could be responsible for a "failure to warn".

dubyah 8y ago

The problem with the no hands-on-steering-wheel detection claim Tesla keeps bringing up is that it's quite fallible and not as conclusive as they insist. A light touch(like one might expect while driving a freeway with cruise control and lane-keep assist, for example) may not provide enough torque for the sensor to detect it. Plenty of people have complained about it in the past. https://forums.teslarati.com/threads/hands-on-the-wheel-detection.4927/ https://forums.teslarati.com/threads/hands-on-the-wheel-dete... https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/hands-on-steering-wheel-detection-during-ap.99671/ https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/hands-on-steering-wh... https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/tesla-autopilot-not-sensing-hands-steering-wheel https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/tesla-autopilot-not-se...

sjwright 8y ago
> The problem with the no hands-on-steering-wheel detection claim Tesla keeps bringing up I don't get why it matters. Why is Tesla's responsibility greater or lesser based on the position of the driver's hands? The driver could have had one hand on the wheel while mousing around on a laptop with the other. Or he could have been intensely focused on the road ahead with his hands resting on his legs, inches away from the wheel. I'm neither defending nor attacking Tesla here, because I don't think I have sufficient information to have an opinion either way. But I'm pretty sure that learning the answer to this particular question wouldn't have any bearing on any opinion I might eventually form.
- rightbyte 8y ago
  It's a dead man switch. If the dead man switch is not working it's a system malfunction.
  - sjwright 8y ago
    That might be technically true, but it's irrelevant. Nowhere does Tesla ever describe it to the customer as a dead man switch. And it wasn't malfunctioning. He wasn't a dead man. He was very much alive, understood the warnings, understood that the car expected him to keep his hands on the wheel and keep paying attention to the road. He understood the warnings so well that he was capable of avoiding them with such proficiency that he did not receive one for 15 minutes.

solveit 8y ago

> These stats don't help when you read the guy had two kids who will now grow up fatherless for rest of their lives. PRwise, yes. But it could've been 7.4 kids who would grow up fatherless for the rest of their lives.

chewyland 8y ago

Was adding the "kid" part integral to the reply? Made me cringe a bit.

Beldin 8y ago

Looks like sensors failed to see concrete divider in nice sunny weather and car slammed in to it at 70mph. Driver was obviously over confident on system's ability to self-drive, probably busy looking at phone and ignored warnings to put his hands on steering. Why would you trust the "hands-on-steer" sensors? There was a sensor problem, after all. No reason to trust the manufacturer when they claim these other sensors did work properly.

agumonkey 8y ago

The statistics argument is one the worst thing about Tesla. It's borderline immoral and most probably a PR blunder.

abalone 8y ago

> Driver was obviously over confident I wouldn’t assume that. Videos of this exact scenario prove that the reaction time required is on the order of a few seconds. Everything Tesla says here exaggerates driver culpability, like saying he received “multiple warnings” (15 minutes ago and completely unrelated). Don’t let that hypnotize you into thinking he was being irresponsible here. There may have been other factors at play such as getting blinded by the sun during those few critical seconds of Autopilot error.

tim333 8y ago
If you look at the videos here of a tesla going for a barrier there seems to be about 3 seconds between seeing it's going the wrong way and potential impact. Which is enough time if you're expecting it but not long if it's a surprise https://np.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/b36x27/its_back_after_6_months_of_working_fine_2019515/ https://np.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/b36x27/its_back... (hn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19443925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19443925)
- saalweachter 8y ago
  The short time frame to react to unexpected events is why, if you're a driver, your first response to any unexpected stimuli has to be to decelerate while you evaluate the situation. In turn, this is why tailgating is such a dangerous behavior.
xvf22 8y ago
A big issue is that this can surprise a driver since an update can change the car's behavior.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  Does it stand to reason that not only can an update change the cars behaviour, but that an update is likely to change the car’s behaviour.

capkutay 8y ago

> Driver was obviously over confident on system's ability to self-drive, probably busy looking at phone and ignored warnings to put his hands on steering. and based on personal experience, he was probably overconfident because the person who sold him that car was overconfident. i remember my first tesla autopilot test drive on a freeway...i was a bit nervous...constantly stepping in when i thought the car was tail-gating or not breaking fast enough and the salesman had a very nonchalant attitude as if I was being needlessly anxious about it.

BenFrantzDale 8y ago

I have to wonder what the fatality rate is among the Tesla demographic: those who have relatively new luxury cars.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

>In the US, there is one automotive fatality every 86 million miles across all vehicles from all manufacturers. For Tesla, there is one fatality, including known pedestrian fatalities, every 320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware. If you are driving a Tesla equipped with Autopilot hardware, you are 3.7 times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident. This is a dishonest comparison. You're comparing the Tesla to an "average" that includes 1995 Corollas that will happily let a telephone pole into the cabin and 1999 Dodge Dakotas that will readily turn into a pancake if you put them on their roof. You're also comparing across economic classes and demographic groups. Your average Tesla owner is not going to be working 3rd shift or making a 100mi commute and consequently has a much lower chance of starting a small logging operation after falling asleep at the wheel or harvesting venison at high speed. Your average Tesla owner is also likely of an age where they're too old to be driving dangerously fast for conditions all the time but not yet old enough to be getting bad at driving. Basically the mean/mode Tesla owner is a wealthy-ish 30-something to 50-something man and that's a really safe demographic compared to the national average. If you want to make a fair comparison compare the Teslas models to other sedans of similar age and price.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
MeltySmelty 8y ago
precisely. tesla is full of shit and musk needs to take a serious hike.

bufferoverflow 8y ago

It's unfair that Tesla would get sued for every death, but wouldn't get a comparable reward for every death it prevented.

jfk13 8y ago
But it's perhaps not unfair to sue them for misleading advertising that leads to people getting killed. "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself." creates very different expectations from "While the car is driving itself, the person in the driver's seat is keeping his hands on the steering wheel and his attention on the road at all times."
- bufferoverflow 8y ago
  Doesn't Tesla push the second scenario at the moment?
  - jfk13 8y ago
    At https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/autopilot?redirect=no https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/autopilot?redirect=no, one of those quotes is presented as a full-screen caption at the beginning of the video near the top of the page. The other is found after scrolling down several screens. Which would you consider the more prominent message?
    - jfk13 8y ago
      (Just to clarify, the second message isn't actually present in the form of my suggested rephrasing; but the text that "Current Autopilot features require active driver supervision" is a long way down the page.)
  - jsight 8y ago
    They literally tell you to put your hands on the wheel and pay attention every time you don't, and sometimes even when you do. So yes, they push the idea that awareness is required.

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago

> Looks like sensors failed to see concrete divider in nice sunny weather and car slammed in to it at 70mph. This doesn’t sound right. Last time I looked in to this, Telsa’s software intentionally ignores station objects when the vehicle is traveling at speed. Has this changed?

dragonwriter 8y ago

So, Tesla's sensors failed to detect a concrete barrier and failed to detect he driver’s hands on the wheel, but we’re supposed to assume that the first which was clearly a manufacturing defect was not responsible for the crash because of the second which, we are to presume, must have accurately reflected reality. (Since California uses comparative fault in these kinds of cases, legally this would seem to at best reduce but not actually eliminate Tesla's liability, even were a jury to be convinced by it.) > If you are driving a Tesla equipped with Autopilot hardware, you are 3.7 times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident. Which I suspect says nothing about the vehicles (much less autopilot hardware specifically, and even less the autopilot function), and everything about the age demographics of Tesla owners, because age is a significant factor in accident rates, and there are probably disproportionately few teenagers and other very young drivers driving Teslas. https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuries-deaths-relation-driver-age-united-states-2014-2015/ https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuri...

gthtjtkt 8y ago

You're assuming "failed to detect hands" means that his hands were not on the wheel, which is 100% false. Tesla's have detection is extremely rudimentary and requires the driver to apply torque to the wheel on order to be "detected". You could be grasping the wheel hard enough to turn coal into diamonds and it STILL wouldn't detect your hands unless you move the wheel slightly.

sizzle 8y ago

They need to be aggressively fined until they stop using the term "auto pilot" which is highly disingenuous.

linsomniac 8y ago

Tesla has hammered on this "hands not detected on wheel for 6 seconds" point, but in my experience that doesn't mean anything. Tesla's "hand on wheel" detection is terrible. It basically only works if you have one hand on the wheel at the 2 or 10 o'clock position; you have to be slightly tugging on the wheel. But not TOO much or it disengages. I would usually drive, on long straight sections of the Interstate, with my hand at the 5 o'clock position, resting on my thigh and grasping the wheel. Very little steering input is necessary. But the Tesla always detects this as "hands not on wheel". Ditto if I have both my hands on the wheel, because the pulling force evens out between the left and right side of the wheel. I basically never drive without my hands on the wheel, but Tesla kind of always detects "hands not on wheel". Sometimes I notice it before it sounds the audio alert, but sometimes I don't.

rladd 8y ago

And they still don't work and are still driving at barriers! https://np.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/b36x27/its_back_after_6_months_of_working_fine_2019515/ https://np.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/b36x27/its_back...

Ntrails 8y ago

> Companies need to aggressively enforce, both hands on steering until self-driving is really really really good. Hands on the wheel is such a stupid metric. Two hands on the wheel whilst watching a film on an ipad doesn't do a damned thing. What matters is whether I'm paying attention, a much harder to measure metric. Am I looking at the road, judging distances, hazards, etc. I say this every time autopilots come up - I think it is impossible for a human to give up responsibility for reacting to 99.99% of input and still retain attention for the remaining 0.01%. I certainly don't believe I can do it, and don't intend to use a car that ever expects it.

Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
Chrysler/Cadillan has eye tracking - seems like exactly the thing you want. While it is in automatic driving mode, it tracks your eyes and if you are not looking at the road for an extended period of time, warnings are issued.