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Tesla Driver Watching Movie While Using Autopilot Crashes into Cop Car

31 points by clouddrover 6y ago

amoitnga 6y ago
why not full article title?
- clouddrover 6y ago
  Hacker News submission titles are limited to 80 characters.
pauljurczak 6y ago
Tesla Insurance is going to be a runaway financial success! Maybe even the greatest hit of this decade.
gamblor956 6y ago
Autopilot really loves crashing into cop cars. This isn't the first time it's happened...
mft_ 6y ago
Interesting. The Jalopnik writer suggests that autopilot (in addition to not seeing the big stationary car and hitting it) “steered the car off the road”. Is this known, or assumed? Is it possible that the cop car (with its warning lights on) was parked slightly into the lane the Tesla was driving along? Interested as these would be totally different failure mechanisms - swiping the cop car whilst maintaining reasonable position within a lane is pretty different from deliberately steering out of the lane and heading directly for the cop car.
rjkennedy98 6y ago
The tone of this article is incredibly arrogant. Yes the autopilot made a mistake and yes the driver shouldn’t be watching a video, but to state with absolute certainty that autopilot is more dangerous because of a single incident is sensationalistic BS. Does the author realize that 45k people a year die from driving? Where is the outrage there? I see people watching tv on their phones all the time while driving without autopilot.
- jocker12 6y ago
  > 45k people a year die I am not sure you are looking at the correct numbers. according to NHTSA – https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx there are 1.18 fatalities per 100 millions miles driven. That means, if an individual drives 15.000 miles per year, that individual will face the possibility of dying in a fatal crash as a driver, passenger or pedestrain, once in 6666 years, so the cars and road system are extremely safe as they are today. Most of the self driving cars developers recognize this like Chris Urmson in his Recode Decode interview – “Well, it’s not even that they grab for it, it’s that they experience it for a while and it works, right? And maybe it works perfectly every day for a month. The next day it may not work, but their experience now is, “Oh this works,” and so they’re not prepared to take over and so their ability to kind of save it and monitor it decays with time. So you know in America, somebody dies in a car accident about 1.15 times per 100 million miles. That’s like 10,000 years of an average person’s driving. So, let’s say the technology is pretty good but not that good. You know, someone dies once every 50 million miles. We’re going to have twice as many accidents and fatalities on the roads on average, but for any one individual they could go a lifetime, many lifetimes before they ever see that.” – https://www.recode.net/2017/9/8/16278566/transcript-self-driving-car-engineer-chris-urmson-recode-decode https://www.recode.net/2017/9/8/16278566/transcript-self-dri... or Ford Motor Co. executive vice president Raj Nair – “Ford Motor Co. executive vice president Raj Nair says you get to 90 percent automation pretty quickly once you understand the technology you need. “It takes a lot, lot longer to get to 96 or 97,” he says. “You have a curve, and those last few percentage points are really difficult.” Almost every time auto executives talk about the promise of self-driving cars, they cite the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistic that shows human error is the “critical reason” for all but 6 percent of car crashes. But that’s kind of misleading, says Nair. “If you look at it in terms of fatal accidents and miles driven, humans are actually very reliable machines. We need to create an even more reliable machine.” – https://www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/self-driving-cars-driving-into-the-future/ https://www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/self-driv... or prof. Raj Rajkumar head of Carnegie Mellon University’s leading self-driving laboratory. – “if you do the mileage statistics, one fatality happens every 80 million miles. That is unfortunately of course, but that is a tremendously high bar for automatically vehicle to meet.” min.19.30 of this podcast interview – http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/if_then/2018/05/self_driving_cars_are_not_yet_as_safe_as_human_drivers_says_carnegie_mellon.html http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/if_then/2018/05/self_... What you are using is a fallacy, emotional statement done by self driving cars developers and enthusiasts in order to make people think by adopting this technology they will be part of a bigger better future, by doing essentially nothing.

31 points by clouddrover 6y ago

amoitnga 6y ago

why not full article title?

clouddrover 6y ago
Hacker News submission titles are limited to 80 characters.

pauljurczak 6y ago

Tesla Insurance is going to be a runaway financial success! Maybe even the greatest hit of this decade.

gamblor956 6y ago

Autopilot really loves crashing into cop cars. This isn't the first time it's happened...

mft_ 6y ago

Interesting. The Jalopnik writer suggests that autopilot (in addition to not seeing the big stationary car and hitting it) “steered the car off the road”. Is this known, or assumed? Is it possible that the cop car (with its warning lights on) was parked slightly into the lane the Tesla was driving along? Interested as these would be totally different failure mechanisms - swiping the cop car whilst maintaining reasonable position within a lane is pretty different from deliberately steering out of the lane and heading directly for the cop car.

rjkennedy98 6y ago

The tone of this article is incredibly arrogant. Yes the autopilot made a mistake and yes the driver shouldn’t be watching a video, but to state with absolute certainty that autopilot is more dangerous because of a single incident is sensationalistic BS. Does the author realize that 45k people a year die from driving? Where is the outrage there? I see people watching tv on their phones all the time while driving without autopilot.

jocker12 6y ago
> 45k people a year die I am not sure you are looking at the correct numbers. according to NHTSA – https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx there are 1.18 fatalities per 100 millions miles driven. That means, if an individual drives 15.000 miles per year, that individual will face the possibility of dying in a fatal crash as a driver, passenger or pedestrain, once in 6666 years, so the cars and road system are extremely safe as they are today. Most of the self driving cars developers recognize this like Chris Urmson in his Recode Decode interview – “Well, it’s not even that they grab for it, it’s that they experience it for a while and it works, right? And maybe it works perfectly every day for a month. The next day it may not work, but their experience now is, “Oh this works,” and so they’re not prepared to take over and so their ability to kind of save it and monitor it decays with time. So you know in America, somebody dies in a car accident about 1.15 times per 100 million miles. That’s like 10,000 years of an average person’s driving. So, let’s say the technology is pretty good but not that good. You know, someone dies once every 50 million miles. We’re going to have twice as many accidents and fatalities on the roads on average, but for any one individual they could go a lifetime, many lifetimes before they ever see that.” – https://www.recode.net/2017/9/8/16278566/transcript-self-driving-car-engineer-chris-urmson-recode-decode https://www.recode.net/2017/9/8/16278566/transcript-self-dri... or Ford Motor Co. executive vice president Raj Nair – “Ford Motor Co. executive vice president Raj Nair says you get to 90 percent automation pretty quickly once you understand the technology you need. “It takes a lot, lot longer to get to 96 or 97,” he says. “You have a curve, and those last few percentage points are really difficult.” Almost every time auto executives talk about the promise of self-driving cars, they cite the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistic that shows human error is the “critical reason” for all but 6 percent of car crashes. But that’s kind of misleading, says Nair. “If you look at it in terms of fatal accidents and miles driven, humans are actually very reliable machines. We need to create an even more reliable machine.” – https://www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/self-driving-cars-driving-into-the-future/ https://www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/self-driv... or prof. Raj Rajkumar head of Carnegie Mellon University’s leading self-driving laboratory. – “if you do the mileage statistics, one fatality happens every 80 million miles. That is unfortunately of course, but that is a tremendously high bar for automatically vehicle to meet.” min.19.30 of this podcast interview – http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/if_then/2018/05/self_driving_cars_are_not_yet_as_safe_as_human_drivers_says_carnegie_mellon.html http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/if_then/2018/05/self_... What you are using is a fallacy, emotional statement done by self driving cars developers and enthusiasts in order to make people think by adopting this technology they will be part of a bigger better future, by doing essentially nothing.