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I don't understand why a person would say his cars will be fully self driving within a year when they still run into semi trailers. I guess it's because he want

I don't understand why a person would say his cars will be fully self driving within a year when they still run into semi trailers. I guess it's because he wants people to give him money. It's sad from all directions. And let me pre-empt the replies by saying yes, what matters in safety is the statistics, not a single data point. And let me pre-empt the replies to the reples by saying yes, but the statistics on self-driving cars are not at all encouraging. I suspect Autopilot's running-into-semis rate is worse than humans', for three reasons: (1) Tesla has been cagey about their Autopilot safety stats. If Autopilot was clearly safer, I think they'd be less cagey. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. This is just speculation, of course. What concrete data they have shared is summarized here: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport Teslas with Autopilot on crash roughly once every 3 million miles. To their credit, that's really good! However, they don't say: (1) how often Teslas crash on freeways with Autopilot off, or (2) how often drivers have to take control to prevent Autopilot from crashing. (2) The fatal crash in 2016 was also with a semi trailer. 2/4+ fatal crashes having this failure mode suggests this failure mode is especially high for their vision based system. Not a good look. (3) Pretty much all self-driving companies have disengagement rates way worse than humans. Waymo is leading the pack - by far - at something like once every 10,000 miles in California. There are tons of caveats in interpreting these numbers, and they should probably be treated as an upper bound, since it's at the discretion of the company to only self-report disengagements that would have led to crashes, I believe. But human crash rates are something like once every 300,000 miles. So even lidar based systems are an order magnitude away from humans, by one super rough measure. Lastly, a small correction to the title: This is the third known US autopilot crash. I believe there was a suspected autopilot crash in China some years back as well, and I'm not sure about other countries.

jacquesm 7y ago
If they named 'auto pilot' 'auto driver' it would at least be possible to have a sane discussion about the extent of the gap between the name and the actual performance. Since they named it 'auto pilot' we can not have that discussion because 'auto pilot' is a term that applies to aircraft, not to vehicles and you can not expect your average driver to know what the auto pilot in an aircraft can and can not do. Presumably laypeople will assume that an auto pilot in a plane is more complex than one in a car because they perceive aircraft as more difficult to operate than vehicles (and rightly so).
nick_kline 7y ago
Apparently many or all of the current self driving cars don't do well when running into fixed (ie stopped) physical objects. It must mean somehow in the way that they detect things, they must have to discount stopped objects, and 'moving objects', like cars are detected in a different way. I'd love to hear more background about why this is the way it is. I agree that when you can't handle this kind of situation in a tesla it really challenges the idea that we'll have total self driving in a year. There must be a lot of software that is under testing that could be more reliable than what they have today, yet the issue is still there. The last part (5 or 10%) of regular software dev is really hard, and it should be even harder for self-driving, never yet approved or safe enough self driving software.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  I predict we won't have fully autonomous ("total") self-driving in the next 25 years. To think it will be out in the next year or even in the reasonably expected lifespan of currently shipping Teslas is utter folly, IMO.
  - flukus 7y ago
    When I see long haul trucks driving along highways with humans only taking over in the populated areas I'll believe full self driving may only be a decade away. Tackling the full self driving consumer market when there's lower hanging fruit makes no sense.
    - sundvor 7y ago
      They could wipe out Über.
  - pas 7y ago
    Based on what? It seems this is a classic estimation problem, and we need performance data points to fit a curve. Do we have anyting? Do we even know if this is a problem where we have a chance at accelerated compounding (so exponential improvement rate)?
Animats 7y ago
This is the third known FATAL US autopilot crash. There are other non-fatal crashes. Many with video. Fatal crash in China: [1] Rammed into street sweeper at full highway speed. Non-fatal crash in California.[2] Rammed into fire truck stopped on freeway. Tesla's system does not detect big solid objects in front of the vehicle. It's "recognize rear of car", then "brake for car". No recognition, no braking. Machine learning at its finest. I know, I've posted this before, but I keep seeing denial. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc0yYJ8-Dyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc0yYJ8-Dyo [2] https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/utah-driver-slammed-tesla-firetruck-sues-carmaker-autopilot/story?id=57643591 https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/utah-driver-slammed-tesla-...
- Aromasin 7y ago
  My experience with machine learning and vision systems amounts to one lab assignment a few years back, so forgive me if this is a stupid question - but why is there not a 'complementary' hard coded system built in that can override cases like this? I can think of no reason as to why stopping a car driving full speed into an inanimate object would be a thing that a human can't code. Surely there must be something in place - an "if(hurtlingTowardsWall){ignoreAI; stopCarQuick;}".
  - hnaccy 7y ago
    How do you know there's a stopped object in front of you?
    - knorthfield 7y ago
      Don't the Tesla have forward facing radar?
      - w0utert 7y ago
        Traditional radar is bad at spotting stationary or slow moving objects, and to avoid false positives at every traffic sign or other stationary object above or next to the road, any radar-based object detection has to be tuned conservatively or the car would be flipping out all the time. That’s why other companies use lidar, which is much better at object detection, but has its own problems (like fog or heavy rain, for example)
nitrix 7y ago
Perhaps because the first step to achieving anything is to believe firmly in it.
robotresearcher 7y ago
> Pretty much all self-driving companies have disengagement rates way worse than humans. What’s the human disengagement rate?
- ec109685 7y ago
  When you fall asleep at the wheel? No idea…
  - robotresearcher 7y ago
    Exactly. The parent casually asserts a difference in a measurement that doesn’t apply to humans. We can’t usually disengage to a safety driver. The comparison is not meaningful.
    - ForHackernews 7y ago
      Parent comment compares human crash rate (1/300,000 miles) to self-driving disengage rate (1/10,000 miles). With the assumption that the self-driving system would have crashed had the safety driver not intervened (a reasonably safe assumption, given the purpose of having a safety driver in the first place), this seems like a meaningful apples-to-apples comparison to me.
      - perl4ever 7y ago
        I don't think that the general human crash rate is appropriate to compare. It makes more sense to compare, say, a professional bus driver. As it happens, my uncle drove for a living and I recall he had a plaque for a million miles without an accident.
  - de_watcher 7y ago
    Or "Jesus, take the wheel!"
pjc50 7y ago
> Teslas with Autopilot on crash roughly once every 3 million miles. I also wonder if this statistic includes situations where the autopilot had disengaged immediately beforehand and the human had failed to respond.

jacquesm 7y ago

If they named 'auto pilot' 'auto driver' it would at least be possible to have a sane discussion about the extent of the gap between the name and the actual performance. Since they named it 'auto pilot' we can not have that discussion because 'auto pilot' is a term that applies to aircraft, not to vehicles and you can not expect your average driver to know what the auto pilot in an aircraft can and can not do. Presumably laypeople will assume that an auto pilot in a plane is more complex than one in a car because they perceive aircraft as more difficult to operate than vehicles (and rightly so).

nick_kline 7y ago

Apparently many or all of the current self driving cars don't do well when running into fixed (ie stopped) physical objects. It must mean somehow in the way that they detect things, they must have to discount stopped objects, and 'moving objects', like cars are detected in a different way. I'd love to hear more background about why this is the way it is. I agree that when you can't handle this kind of situation in a tesla it really challenges the idea that we'll have total self driving in a year. There must be a lot of software that is under testing that could be more reliable than what they have today, yet the issue is still there. The last part (5 or 10%) of regular software dev is really hard, and it should be even harder for self-driving, never yet approved or safe enough self driving software.

sokoloff 7y ago
I predict we won't have fully autonomous ("total") self-driving in the next 25 years. To think it will be out in the next year or even in the reasonably expected lifespan of currently shipping Teslas is utter folly, IMO.
- flukus 7y ago
  When I see long haul trucks driving along highways with humans only taking over in the populated areas I'll believe full self driving may only be a decade away. Tackling the full self driving consumer market when there's lower hanging fruit makes no sense.
  - sundvor 7y ago
    They could wipe out Über.
- pas 7y ago
  Based on what? It seems this is a classic estimation problem, and we need performance data points to fit a curve. Do we have anyting? Do we even know if this is a problem where we have a chance at accelerated compounding (so exponential improvement rate)?

Animats 7y ago

This is the third known FATAL US autopilot crash. There are other non-fatal crashes. Many with video. Fatal crash in China: [1] Rammed into street sweeper at full highway speed. Non-fatal crash in California.[2] Rammed into fire truck stopped on freeway. Tesla's system does not detect big solid objects in front of the vehicle. It's "recognize rear of car", then "brake for car". No recognition, no braking. Machine learning at its finest. I know, I've posted this before, but I keep seeing denial. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc0yYJ8-Dyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc0yYJ8-Dyo [2] https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/utah-driver-slammed-tesla-firetruck-sues-carmaker-autopilot/story?id=57643591 https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/utah-driver-slammed-tesla-...

Aromasin 7y ago
My experience with machine learning and vision systems amounts to one lab assignment a few years back, so forgive me if this is a stupid question - but why is there not a 'complementary' hard coded system built in that can override cases like this? I can think of no reason as to why stopping a car driving full speed into an inanimate object would be a thing that a human can't code. Surely there must be something in place - an "if(hurtlingTowardsWall){ignoreAI; stopCarQuick;}".
- hnaccy 7y ago
  How do you know there's a stopped object in front of you?
  - knorthfield 7y ago
    Don't the Tesla have forward facing radar?
    - w0utert 7y ago
      Traditional radar is bad at spotting stationary or slow moving objects, and to avoid false positives at every traffic sign or other stationary object above or next to the road, any radar-based object detection has to be tuned conservatively or the car would be flipping out all the time. That’s why other companies use lidar, which is much better at object detection, but has its own problems (like fog or heavy rain, for example)

nitrix 7y ago

Perhaps because the first step to achieving anything is to believe firmly in it.

robotresearcher 7y ago

> Pretty much all self-driving companies have disengagement rates way worse than humans. What’s the human disengagement rate?

ec109685 7y ago
When you fall asleep at the wheel? No idea…
- robotresearcher 7y ago
  Exactly. The parent casually asserts a difference in a measurement that doesn’t apply to humans. We can’t usually disengage to a safety driver. The comparison is not meaningful.
  - ForHackernews 7y ago
    Parent comment compares human crash rate (1/300,000 miles) to self-driving disengage rate (1/10,000 miles). With the assumption that the self-driving system would have crashed had the safety driver not intervened (a reasonably safe assumption, given the purpose of having a safety driver in the first place), this seems like a meaningful apples-to-apples comparison to me.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      I don't think that the general human crash rate is appropriate to compare. It makes more sense to compare, say, a professional bus driver. As it happens, my uncle drove for a living and I recall he had a plaque for a million miles without an accident.
- de_watcher 7y ago
  Or "Jesus, take the wheel!"

pjc50 7y ago

> Teslas with Autopilot on crash roughly once every 3 million miles. I also wonder if this statistic includes situations where the autopilot had disengaged immediately beforehand and the human had failed to respond.