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Fire truck driver here: People crash into parked fire trucks and ambulances and cop cars all the damn time. That's why we park the Big Red Truck at an angle beh

Fire truck driver here: People crash into parked fire trucks and ambulances and cop cars all the damn time. That's why we park the Big Red Truck at an angle behind the accident -- so that when the 2-ton car crashes into the 30-ton truck, the car will bounce off and the people behind the truck (us) won't be injured. I don't disagree that Tesla's software is partly to blame here, but the null experiment also has a lousy track record.

smt88 7y ago
The null experiment is the human driver of that particular Tesla, not an average of all drivers
- schiffern 7y ago
  So if the crash didn't involve "the human driver of that particular Tesla" but instead was an identical incident with a different Tesla driver, we wouldn't be having this conversation? Because that seems highly improbable. This particular driver isn't what makes the story special or newsworthy. The nature of the incident is. Our choice of statistical cohort should reflect this data selection effect, ie "all Autopilot miles driven," not "all miles driven by <person's name>."
  - smt88 7y ago
    I disagree because we're comparing what this individual driver would have done without a feature advertised as Autopilot. I'm a partner in an auto insurance company, and most of our no-accident records will stay that way, statistically speaking. If this driver had a one in a billion miles chance of crashing and Autopilot (with an inattentve driver, as they all tend to be) had a one in a million miles chance, then Autopilot is decreasing safety. At a certain level of safety, Autopilot would make everyone safer, but it's definitely not there yet.
    - chingjun 7y ago
      How do you know that this individual driver has a one in a billion miles chance of crashing? By statistics from other human drivers I assume?
      - smt88 7y ago
        I didn't say that I knew. I was only disputing the relevance of defending individual Tesla crashes by saying that Tesla's are, on average, less likely to crash when on Autopilot. You can't compare Tesla drivers on Autopilot to all drivers -- you have to compare them to themselves, or you have an extraneous variable. Fatal human accidents are on the order of 1-10 every billion miles of driving in the US, yes. Tesla Autopilot crashes seem to be much, much, much more common.
TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
This one time I go stopped at a fruit fly control point on the border between South Australia and Victoria, near Bordertown. The person staffing the control point indicated with hand signals for me to stop on the highway in the lane I was in. So I slowed down to walking speed and pulled off the highway into the car park next to the office. The agent then lectured me about not following instructions and that she could fine me for disobeying. I then calmly explained to the agent the reason I didn't stop in the lane on the highway: drivers of cars and heavy vehicles are known to have a terrible habit of not seeing other vehicles stopped on the road.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  It always blows my mind when a highway patrol scolds me for not stopping immediately on the side of the road, instead pulling off at the first exit/intersection to make it safer for us. I'd estimate it's about 10% of the time. But on the contrary, I've also had them express appreciation for doing the same thing.
  - cortesoft 7y ago
    Jesus, how many times have you been pulled over that 10% of the time is more than once!?
    - newnewpdro 7y ago
      There was a period of a few years where I drove a track-prepped race car on the street daily, with out of state plates for emissions reasons, and it resulted in a lot of police encounters.
      - SOLAR_FIELDS 7y ago
        Has there been any studies of this? I think it’s well known that if you drive a sports car you get pulled over more often, but I drive a beat up pickup in the south of USA and almost never get pulled over even though I’m frequently 5-10 MPH over the speed limit. Would be interesting to see pickup vs a normal mid range sedan vs sports cars in numbers. Maybe throw in out of state plates as an extra variable.
bg24 7y ago
I was going at 30-40mph in the right lane on a 4-lane all empty highway, when a gentleman flies at 60-70mph and hits us right behind, goes 360 turn with us and we hit the wall. Everyone survived without any medical incident (other than that I do panic and respectfully avoid those fliers now-a-days). Relevant because: - I hope my sprinter (size of mini truck, with upfittings) had an autopilot in the front/rear to speed up or divert to save an accident. - +1 to your parking angle. The other driver survived because he hit us at an angle and skidded full circle to minimize the impact. Of course, that helped our life as well.
- gbrown 7y ago
  The other driver was clearly 100% totally at fault, but I'm just curious: why were you going 30-40 on a four lane highway? Where I live that's at least 25 below the speed limit. Here it's mostly tractors and other farm equipment driving at those speeds.
  - dahfizz 7y ago
    Yeah, that seems dangerous. There is usually a hard 45mph minimum on the highways near me.
    - saalweachter 7y ago
      I'm never going to to discourage people from driving slow, because our monkey brains have shit reaction times and perception, and KE increases with the square of velocity, but if you're traveling well below the normal speed of travel, put your flashers on. In many places this is mandated for a certain amount under the limit.
      - cardiffspaceman 7y ago
        In my view the wreck isn’t made worse so much by absolute magnitude of one momentum vector as by the magnitude of the difference in momentum vectors.
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
On Beijing’s third ring road one time, I saw a lady being stopped by a cop for some reason (rare, cops never pull over anybody there), she got into her car and promptly rammed into the police car directly in front of her (on accident I assume). I think she was having a bad day or something.
mhermher 7y ago
Of course the top comment is apologia.
imtringued 7y ago
The difference is if an AI fails to handle a certain situation then it will fail every single time. With humans there is a random element and a small fraction end up failing.
- elaus 7y ago
  But situations are never "the same". The input (camera images, sensor data) will always be (slightly) different and – in this example – might just lift the confidence of "this is a truck standing on the road" over the threshold.
- stedaniels 7y ago
  But to an AI, a certain situation has millions of data points, it's very rare for a certain situation to reoccur. Similar types and classes of situations? You betcha. But they'd be handled based on other data points as well.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  Then it's not an AI but just complicated if-statements; if it was more like a real AI then it would learn from the experience. The core premise of AI is that it's learning and improving all the time, not that it does the exact same thing every time.
  - LoSboccacc 7y ago
    you don't want that either, because you want to quality control the changes to behaviour. see for example first generation Forza drivatars, that learned from other online player unconstrained and became insufferable assholes
- tim333 7y ago
  In practice Tesla's thing only seems to have crashed into a fire truck a couple of times against I imagine a large number of misses.
alkonaut 7y ago
No TMA vehicles? I haven't seen an accident without TMA here, I think no one is even supposed to go out to the accident before the TMA is in place.
FireBeyond 7y ago
As another fire engine driver (now officer), this is why more and more departments are employing "blocker engines", old decommissioned, stripped engines to provide this security, without risking a $500,000 engine to $1.5MM tiller. Also, anything that fails to assume that emergency traffic may be at a vastly differing speed from other traffic, or that emergency lights should _almost exclusively result in an autopilot disengagement_ (because their behavior should but is not always entirely predictable, particularly to a machine without sufficient context and/or experience) is to me inherently poorly designed.
- drdeadringer 7y ago
  > this is why more and more departments are employing "blocker engines", old decommissioned, stripped engines to provide this security, without risking a $500,000 engine to $1.5MM tiller. That's pretty clever. I don't know why I didn't think of that myself.
- dreamcompiler 7y ago
  > As another fire engine driver (now officer), this is why more and more departments are employing "blocker engines", old decommissioned, stripped engines to provide this security, without risking a $500,000 engine to $1.5MM tiller. Very interesting idea! You wouldn't even need a dedicated bay for it because who cares if it gets faded in the sun or rained on? An old tender that still holds water would be perfect for this.
  - jakobegger 7y ago
    Even better would be a truck with an impact attenuator [1] in the back. Those have the potential of saving the life of whoever crashes into it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_attenuator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_attenuator
navigatesol 7y ago
>People crash into parked fire trucks and ambulances and cop cars all the damn time. Autopilot is supposed to be safer than humans, not equivalent to the worst drivers.
nabdab 7y ago
The argument that Tesla is not fully to blame because people also fails seems fundamentally flawed. A human driver at fault cannot avoid blame by simple asserting that other human drivers also make similar mistakes.

smt88 7y ago

The null experiment is the human driver of that particular Tesla, not an average of all drivers

schiffern 7y ago
So if the crash didn't involve "the human driver of that particular Tesla" but instead was an identical incident with a different Tesla driver, we wouldn't be having this conversation? Because that seems highly improbable. This particular driver isn't what makes the story special or newsworthy. The nature of the incident is. Our choice of statistical cohort should reflect this data selection effect, ie "all Autopilot miles driven," not "all miles driven by <person's name>."
- smt88 7y ago
  I disagree because we're comparing what this individual driver would have done without a feature advertised as Autopilot. I'm a partner in an auto insurance company, and most of our no-accident records will stay that way, statistically speaking. If this driver had a one in a billion miles chance of crashing and Autopilot (with an inattentve driver, as they all tend to be) had a one in a million miles chance, then Autopilot is decreasing safety. At a certain level of safety, Autopilot would make everyone safer, but it's definitely not there yet.
  - chingjun 7y ago
    How do you know that this individual driver has a one in a billion miles chance of crashing? By statistics from other human drivers I assume?
    - smt88 7y ago
      I didn't say that I knew. I was only disputing the relevance of defending individual Tesla crashes by saying that Tesla's are, on average, less likely to crash when on Autopilot. You can't compare Tesla drivers on Autopilot to all drivers -- you have to compare them to themselves, or you have an extraneous variable. Fatal human accidents are on the order of 1-10 every billion miles of driving in the US, yes. Tesla Autopilot crashes seem to be much, much, much more common.

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago

This one time I go stopped at a fruit fly control point on the border between South Australia and Victoria, near Bordertown. The person staffing the control point indicated with hand signals for me to stop on the highway in the lane I was in. So I slowed down to walking speed and pulled off the highway into the car park next to the office. The agent then lectured me about not following instructions and that she could fine me for disobeying. I then calmly explained to the agent the reason I didn't stop in the lane on the highway: drivers of cars and heavy vehicles are known to have a terrible habit of not seeing other vehicles stopped on the road.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
newnewpdro 7y ago
It always blows my mind when a highway patrol scolds me for not stopping immediately on the side of the road, instead pulling off at the first exit/intersection to make it safer for us. I'd estimate it's about 10% of the time. But on the contrary, I've also had them express appreciation for doing the same thing.
- cortesoft 7y ago
  Jesus, how many times have you been pulled over that 10% of the time is more than once!?
  - newnewpdro 7y ago
    There was a period of a few years where I drove a track-prepped race car on the street daily, with out of state plates for emissions reasons, and it resulted in a lot of police encounters.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 7y ago
      Has there been any studies of this? I think it’s well known that if you drive a sports car you get pulled over more often, but I drive a beat up pickup in the south of USA and almost never get pulled over even though I’m frequently 5-10 MPH over the speed limit. Would be interesting to see pickup vs a normal mid range sedan vs sports cars in numbers. Maybe throw in out of state plates as an extra variable.

bg24 7y ago

I was going at 30-40mph in the right lane on a 4-lane all empty highway, when a gentleman flies at 60-70mph and hits us right behind, goes 360 turn with us and we hit the wall. Everyone survived without any medical incident (other than that I do panic and respectfully avoid those fliers now-a-days). Relevant because: - I hope my sprinter (size of mini truck, with upfittings) had an autopilot in the front/rear to speed up or divert to save an accident. - +1 to your parking angle. The other driver survived because he hit us at an angle and skidded full circle to minimize the impact. Of course, that helped our life as well.

gbrown 7y ago
The other driver was clearly 100% totally at fault, but I'm just curious: why were you going 30-40 on a four lane highway? Where I live that's at least 25 below the speed limit. Here it's mostly tractors and other farm equipment driving at those speeds.
- dahfizz 7y ago
  Yeah, that seems dangerous. There is usually a hard 45mph minimum on the highways near me.
  - saalweachter 7y ago
    I'm never going to to discourage people from driving slow, because our monkey brains have shit reaction times and perception, and KE increases with the square of velocity, but if you're traveling well below the normal speed of travel, put your flashers on. In many places this is mandated for a certain amount under the limit.
    - cardiffspaceman 7y ago
      In my view the wreck isn’t made worse so much by absolute magnitude of one momentum vector as by the magnitude of the difference in momentum vectors.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

On Beijing’s third ring road one time, I saw a lady being stopped by a cop for some reason (rare, cops never pull over anybody there), she got into her car and promptly rammed into the police car directly in front of her (on accident I assume). I think she was having a bad day or something.

mhermher 7y ago

Of course the top comment is apologia.

imtringued 7y ago

The difference is if an AI fails to handle a certain situation then it will fail every single time. With humans there is a random element and a small fraction end up failing.

elaus 7y ago
But situations are never "the same". The input (camera images, sensor data) will always be (slightly) different and – in this example – might just lift the confidence of "this is a truck standing on the road" over the threshold.
stedaniels 7y ago
But to an AI, a certain situation has millions of data points, it's very rare for a certain situation to reoccur. Similar types and classes of situations? You betcha. But they'd be handled based on other data points as well.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
Then it's not an AI but just complicated if-statements; if it was more like a real AI then it would learn from the experience. The core premise of AI is that it's learning and improving all the time, not that it does the exact same thing every time.
- LoSboccacc 7y ago
  you don't want that either, because you want to quality control the changes to behaviour. see for example first generation Forza drivatars, that learned from other online player unconstrained and became insufferable assholes
tim333 7y ago
In practice Tesla's thing only seems to have crashed into a fire truck a couple of times against I imagine a large number of misses.

alkonaut 7y ago

No TMA vehicles? I haven't seen an accident without TMA here, I think no one is even supposed to go out to the accident before the TMA is in place.

FireBeyond 7y ago

As another fire engine driver (now officer), this is why more and more departments are employing "blocker engines", old decommissioned, stripped engines to provide this security, without risking a $500,000 engine to $1.5MM tiller. Also, anything that fails to assume that emergency traffic may be at a vastly differing speed from other traffic, or that emergency lights should _almost exclusively result in an autopilot disengagement_ (because their behavior should but is not always entirely predictable, particularly to a machine without sufficient context and/or experience) is to me inherently poorly designed.

drdeadringer 7y ago
> this is why more and more departments are employing "blocker engines", old decommissioned, stripped engines to provide this security, without risking a $500,000 engine to $1.5MM tiller. That's pretty clever. I don't know why I didn't think of that myself.
dreamcompiler 7y ago
> As another fire engine driver (now officer), this is why more and more departments are employing "blocker engines", old decommissioned, stripped engines to provide this security, without risking a $500,000 engine to $1.5MM tiller. Very interesting idea! You wouldn't even need a dedicated bay for it because who cares if it gets faded in the sun or rained on? An old tender that still holds water would be perfect for this.
- jakobegger 7y ago
  Even better would be a truck with an impact attenuator [1] in the back. Those have the potential of saving the life of whoever crashes into it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_attenuator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_attenuator

navigatesol 7y ago

>People crash into parked fire trucks and ambulances and cop cars all the damn time. Autopilot is supposed to be safer than humans, not equivalent to the worst drivers.

nabdab 7y ago

The argument that Tesla is not fully to blame because people also fails seems fundamentally flawed. A human driver at fault cannot avoid blame by simple asserting that other human drivers also make similar mistakes.