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Tesla has a history of using remote diagnostics to snitch on drivers instead of allowing investigators to do their job. It’s a valid concern that your car manu

Tesla has a history of using remote diagnostics to snitch on drivers instead of allowing investigators to do their job. It’s a valid concern that your car manufacturer will use the interior cameras to blame a crime on you. These automatic tagging features also bring to question the bias in algorithms. What does this mean for drivers with disabilities? Is it possible that a safe driver with ADHD or Turrets etc might be flagged as inattentive during an autopilot crash and therefore at fault?

yardie 6y ago
If a driver was inattentive and had a crash wouldn't they be at fault regardless of ADHD or Tourets?
- notyourwork 6y ago
  Falsely flagged is the keyword your statement ignores.
  - SkyBelow 6y ago
    I think the question was asked with the implied addition 'What Tesla says won't matter in court.' I don't agree with that though, for two reasons. First, it will be harder for them to fight, meaning it will still be a source of bias even if the court isn't biased at all. Even if they can show it was a false flag, that is time and money others wouldn't have to spend. Potentially time and money of someone who was in a life altering crash. Second, it would not be surprised that the court ends up being biased towards the manufacture and would give undue weight to them because they have the fancy algorithms and all the well payed lawyers.
- R0b0t1 6y ago
  The OP is suggesting neuroatypical people might be flagged as being inattentive despite being attentive due to being underrepresented in the training set.
jlarocco 6y ago
> These automatic tagging features also bring to question the bias in algorithms. What does this mean for drivers with disabilities? Is it possible that a safe driver with ADHD or Turrets etc might be flagged as inattentive during an autopilot crash and therefore at fault? I'm not understanding your point here, and you seem to contradict yourself a little bit. A driver with a disability that makes them inattentive can't be a "safe driver." Having a disability that makes them inattentive, appearing inattentive, and getting into a crash (autopilot or not), seems to be a "three strikes and you're out" situation, IMO. You'll have a very hard time convincing me the person wasn't at fault in that situation. Certain disabilities prevent people from driving cars safely. It's unfortunate, but it's just the way it is.
- threatofrain 6y ago
  Safety is in the sum of all things, AKA performance. An ADD person may drive a car safely and we might not know why; what we do know is performance. If an ADD person does then get into an accident, should they endure higher civil and criminal risk, regardless of prior performance and in light of their condition?
- M2Ys4U 6y ago
  >A driver with a disability that makes them inattentive can't be a "safe driver." A driver with a disability that makes a computer system classify them as an inattentive driver is not the same thing as a driver with a disability that makes them inattentive.
  - zaroth 6y ago
    This could certainly cause the UI to falsely show alerts or refuse to enable the autopilot. But when it comes to actually reviewing a case in an accident, you would want to review the actual footage, not just the metadata. Looking at just the metadata is already problematic. For example, the “hands on wheel” metadata in a Tesla is based on angular force detected on the wheel, not actual hands on the wheel. Tesla will report that the driver didn’t touch the wheel in X seconds, when it would be more accurate to say the driver didn’t apply angular force, although their hands might have been resting on the wheel the whole time.
megablast 6y ago
Good. Driving is dangerous enough. We should get bad drivers of the road.
- m463 6y ago
  You are a bad driver. so am I. humans are bad drivers.
gravitas 6y ago
> What does this mean for drivers with disabilities? You mention ADHD and Turrets; a leg-disabled person (e.g. paralyzed waste down) can still drive just fine, special hand-operated equipment is installed to a car to allow the hands to take over for the foot pedals. By design this driver may be looking down frequently at their controls (let's assume not everyone is a pro driver yet and knows them by heart) which could easily be misconstrued as looking down at a mobile phone, placing immediate bias against them on video before the facts of hand-controls are revealed in court.
- bdamm 6y ago
  While I agree with the concern, I think there's almost zero chance that a neural net trained on people looking at phones would classify a driver looking at hand controls as that same thing. The neural net would more likely have another classification of "unknown attention", being unable to conclusively classify the driver's attention.
- hnarn 6y ago
  Since you have both now misspelled the name of the neurological disorder, I feel obliged to point out that it’s spelled Tourette's syndrome.
  - gravitas 6y ago
    My apologies - I did not spell check the cut&paste as I should have done, my bad. No slight meant.
- dbcurtis 6y ago
  > By design this driver may be looking down frequently at their controls Actually not, for hand controls. No more than you look at the pedals. It goes into muscle memory just as much. I have been a passenger with two different hand-control drivers. Both were as smooth as a driver using foot pedals. I once moved their car for one of them —- in a tiny town on a quiet street, for about 5 blocks at low speed. It was difficult for me — zero muscle memory and zero “feel” for the car. It does take some practice, I will give you that, but you never have to look at the lever, even as a noob.
kmonsen 6y ago
Is there any incentive for the drivers to not just tape over this camera? As far as I see this information will almost certainly only be used against you. But then again, perhaps taping over the camera will be used against you as well.
- trevyn 6y ago
  Autopilot will be disabled.
deviation 6y ago
What do you mean by snitch? I think it's a perfectly valid reason to "snitch" if the driver was truly at fault. There's some great reasons for driver-facing cameras- and if one of those trade-offs is that drivers are less likely to "get away" with causing a crash, then that's fine in my books. Bias feels like a different argument entirely, though I do share your concern about it...
- slg 6y ago
  >What do you mean by snitch? I think it's a perfectly valid reason to "snitch" if the driver was truly at fault. The driver is always truly at fault in the current legal environment. A driver can't just blame it on the car to escape liability. The comments here talking about the legal ramifications for these tags are misguided. For these tags to matter, there would need to be legislative changes to shift the liability to the autonomous system and that would likely only happen once we reach at least level 4 autonomy. Plus once we get to that point, whether the driver is paying attention or not shouldn't matter anyway.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > The driver is always truly at fault in the current legal environment. That's...not entirely and exclusively true. > A driver can't just blame it on the car to escape liability. If it was provably due to a manufacturing defect that the driver could not reasonably have known about, I think you are wrong. If a manufacturing defect is involved, then whether or not the driver is also liable, the manufacturer and every party in the chain of commerce (both upstream—such as suppliers of the defective component—and downstream from the vehicle manufacturer, such as dealers, etc., which are mostly irrelevant for Tesla) is liable.
    - slg 6y ago
      You are right about the exception of a defective product. I should have included that disclaimer in my original comment. However defective is an important qualifier. Autopilot is not designed to be the primary driver of the car. A Tesla on Autopilot rear-ending another driver is no more defective than any other car on cruise control rear-ending someone. Autopilot would likely need to overrule human action to be considered defective. I was assuming that is an unlikely enough case to avoid mentioning it. Even if that did occur, that would be evident in other logs the car keeps so this attention monitor wouldn't be relevant.
judge2020 6y ago
> It’s a valid concern that your car manufacturer will use the interior cameras to blame a crime on you. Don't see when they would ever be responsible for a crime legally, outside of being 'blamed' in dozens of national news headlines; the current legal landscape has continued to uphold that you are responsible for the car even when it's trying to drive itself. Even with Navigate on Autopilot, you have to continuously apply force to the wheel to prevent it from nagging at the driver. The feature mentioned in the article would be used if regulation increased to require the car use a camera/similar system to determine if a driver is inattentive while autopilot is enabled.
- BoorishBears 6y ago
  When the creator of your car makes comments like "Your hands are just there for regulatory reasons" Then turns around and blames you for acting like that's true when a known defect kills your wife (aside: Why do you think Mobileye had the same tech as AP1 in multiple other cars but never turned it on continuously? Why do you think it was always limited to highway speeds and correcting a lack of input? Well that's because it can't tell an overhead sign from a stopped firetruck very well...) Are we really then allowed to go back and go "well they had a nice disclaimer". - It's funny really, because calling it Autopilot wasn't enough (spare me the airplane comparisons). Now there's a feature list called "Full Self Driving... capability" Like, the term FSD is used as part of a label for a collection of features, of which NOT A SINGLE ONE is even a COMPONENT of self driving, because EVERY SINGLE ONE requires full time driver attention. They're literally using the fact that theoretically, one day, the SENSORS MIGHT OVERLAP WITH WHAT FSD REQUIRES to sell it as... not FSD. FSD capability. What a joke. - Tesla has gotten away with homicide, and I guess we're ok with them continuing to. The useless comparisons about "Tesla with AP is safer than Tesla without", show me the comparison that Tesla with AP is safer than AEB+LKA+ACC (pretty much AP, minus the party trick that lulls drivers into a false sense of security), and I'll show you a made up study. Because that would be AP being exactly what it already is, minus the one mode where the driver is supposed to be a safety net for the computer. Where the driver already has responsibility to make sure it doesn't crash! It's literally like removing the ability to steer your bike with the training wheels, the training wheels are still there! It's simple really, Tesla has put marketability of a safety feature, over the actual safety benefits, at the cost of human lives.
waheoo 6y ago
Inattentive ADHD doeant work the way you think it does.
- fudged71 6y ago
  As someone diagnosed with ADHD who sometimes looks in the rear view mirror more often than I should, I have to challenge you here.
  - waheoo 6y ago
    That isn't inattentive ADHD, thats just ADHD, and really sounds like a scenario in which this this camera tech should detect as a problem.
mlindner 6y ago
Before you go all conspiracy theory, try reading the actual article. It's an opt-in and the data is not recorded nor uploaded to Tesla without an opt-in control.
- jerf 6y ago
  We're like 300 yards down the slippery slope and gaining speed fast. Today's "It's opt-in and isn't being recorded" is tomorrow's "If you don't agree to allow us to use this video in any manner we deem fit, or if you leave 4G+ coverage for an excessive period of time, your car may not start".
  - mlindner 6y ago
    We haven't been gaining speed here at all. Check your tinfoil hat at the door.
mikx007 6y ago
and thats why I drive Chevy Bolt!
ficklepickle 6y ago
This is a legit concern. There are many edge cases with humans. I worked at a pizza place in high school. There was a delivery driver with cerebral paulsy who was constantly being accused of being drunk. Sometimes customers just called the cops on him. It was sad, he was a super nice young guy already on a short clock and he had to deal with that all the time.

yardie 6y ago

If a driver was inattentive and had a crash wouldn't they be at fault regardless of ADHD or Tourets?

notyourwork 6y ago
Falsely flagged is the keyword your statement ignores.
- SkyBelow 6y ago
  I think the question was asked with the implied addition 'What Tesla says won't matter in court.' I don't agree with that though, for two reasons. First, it will be harder for them to fight, meaning it will still be a source of bias even if the court isn't biased at all. Even if they can show it was a false flag, that is time and money others wouldn't have to spend. Potentially time and money of someone who was in a life altering crash. Second, it would not be surprised that the court ends up being biased towards the manufacture and would give undue weight to them because they have the fancy algorithms and all the well payed lawyers.
R0b0t1 6y ago
The OP is suggesting neuroatypical people might be flagged as being inattentive despite being attentive due to being underrepresented in the training set.

jlarocco 6y ago

> These automatic tagging features also bring to question the bias in algorithms. What does this mean for drivers with disabilities? Is it possible that a safe driver with ADHD or Turrets etc might be flagged as inattentive during an autopilot crash and therefore at fault? I'm not understanding your point here, and you seem to contradict yourself a little bit. A driver with a disability that makes them inattentive can't be a "safe driver." Having a disability that makes them inattentive, appearing inattentive, and getting into a crash (autopilot or not), seems to be a "three strikes and you're out" situation, IMO. You'll have a very hard time convincing me the person wasn't at fault in that situation. Certain disabilities prevent people from driving cars safely. It's unfortunate, but it's just the way it is.

threatofrain 6y ago
Safety is in the sum of all things, AKA performance. An ADD person may drive a car safely and we might not know why; what we do know is performance. If an ADD person does then get into an accident, should they endure higher civil and criminal risk, regardless of prior performance and in light of their condition?
M2Ys4U 6y ago
>A driver with a disability that makes them inattentive can't be a "safe driver." A driver with a disability that makes a computer system classify them as an inattentive driver is not the same thing as a driver with a disability that makes them inattentive.
- zaroth 6y ago
  This could certainly cause the UI to falsely show alerts or refuse to enable the autopilot. But when it comes to actually reviewing a case in an accident, you would want to review the actual footage, not just the metadata. Looking at just the metadata is already problematic. For example, the “hands on wheel” metadata in a Tesla is based on angular force detected on the wheel, not actual hands on the wheel. Tesla will report that the driver didn’t touch the wheel in X seconds, when it would be more accurate to say the driver didn’t apply angular force, although their hands might have been resting on the wheel the whole time.

megablast 6y ago

Good. Driving is dangerous enough. We should get bad drivers of the road.

m463 6y ago
You are a bad driver. so am I. humans are bad drivers.

gravitas 6y ago

> What does this mean for drivers with disabilities? You mention ADHD and Turrets; a leg-disabled person (e.g. paralyzed waste down) can still drive just fine, special hand-operated equipment is installed to a car to allow the hands to take over for the foot pedals. By design this driver may be looking down frequently at their controls (let's assume not everyone is a pro driver yet and knows them by heart) which could easily be misconstrued as looking down at a mobile phone, placing immediate bias against them on video before the facts of hand-controls are revealed in court.

bdamm 6y ago
While I agree with the concern, I think there's almost zero chance that a neural net trained on people looking at phones would classify a driver looking at hand controls as that same thing. The neural net would more likely have another classification of "unknown attention", being unable to conclusively classify the driver's attention.
hnarn 6y ago
Since you have both now misspelled the name of the neurological disorder, I feel obliged to point out that it’s spelled Tourette's syndrome.
- gravitas 6y ago
  My apologies - I did not spell check the cut&paste as I should have done, my bad. No slight meant.
dbcurtis 6y ago
> By design this driver may be looking down frequently at their controls Actually not, for hand controls. No more than you look at the pedals. It goes into muscle memory just as much. I have been a passenger with two different hand-control drivers. Both were as smooth as a driver using foot pedals. I once moved their car for one of them —- in a tiny town on a quiet street, for about 5 blocks at low speed. It was difficult for me — zero muscle memory and zero “feel” for the car. It does take some practice, I will give you that, but you never have to look at the lever, even as a noob.

kmonsen 6y ago

Is there any incentive for the drivers to not just tape over this camera? As far as I see this information will almost certainly only be used against you. But then again, perhaps taping over the camera will be used against you as well.

trevyn 6y ago
Autopilot will be disabled.

deviation 6y ago

What do you mean by snitch? I think it's a perfectly valid reason to "snitch" if the driver was truly at fault. There's some great reasons for driver-facing cameras- and if one of those trade-offs is that drivers are less likely to "get away" with causing a crash, then that's fine in my books. Bias feels like a different argument entirely, though I do share your concern about it...

slg 6y ago
>What do you mean by snitch? I think it's a perfectly valid reason to "snitch" if the driver was truly at fault. The driver is always truly at fault in the current legal environment. A driver can't just blame it on the car to escape liability. The comments here talking about the legal ramifications for these tags are misguided. For these tags to matter, there would need to be legislative changes to shift the liability to the autonomous system and that would likely only happen once we reach at least level 4 autonomy. Plus once we get to that point, whether the driver is paying attention or not shouldn't matter anyway.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > The driver is always truly at fault in the current legal environment. That's...not entirely and exclusively true. > A driver can't just blame it on the car to escape liability. If it was provably due to a manufacturing defect that the driver could not reasonably have known about, I think you are wrong. If a manufacturing defect is involved, then whether or not the driver is also liable, the manufacturer and every party in the chain of commerce (both upstream—such as suppliers of the defective component—and downstream from the vehicle manufacturer, such as dealers, etc., which are mostly irrelevant for Tesla) is liable.
  - slg 6y ago
    You are right about the exception of a defective product. I should have included that disclaimer in my original comment. However defective is an important qualifier. Autopilot is not designed to be the primary driver of the car. A Tesla on Autopilot rear-ending another driver is no more defective than any other car on cruise control rear-ending someone. Autopilot would likely need to overrule human action to be considered defective. I was assuming that is an unlikely enough case to avoid mentioning it. Even if that did occur, that would be evident in other logs the car keeps so this attention monitor wouldn't be relevant.

judge2020 6y ago

> It’s a valid concern that your car manufacturer will use the interior cameras to blame a crime on you. Don't see when they would ever be responsible for a crime legally, outside of being 'blamed' in dozens of national news headlines; the current legal landscape has continued to uphold that you are responsible for the car even when it's trying to drive itself. Even with Navigate on Autopilot, you have to continuously apply force to the wheel to prevent it from nagging at the driver. The feature mentioned in the article would be used if regulation increased to require the car use a camera/similar system to determine if a driver is inattentive while autopilot is enabled.

BoorishBears 6y ago
When the creator of your car makes comments like "Your hands are just there for regulatory reasons" Then turns around and blames you for acting like that's true when a known defect kills your wife (aside: Why do you think Mobileye had the same tech as AP1 in multiple other cars but never turned it on continuously? Why do you think it was always limited to highway speeds and correcting a lack of input? Well that's because it can't tell an overhead sign from a stopped firetruck very well...) Are we really then allowed to go back and go "well they had a nice disclaimer". - It's funny really, because calling it Autopilot wasn't enough (spare me the airplane comparisons). Now there's a feature list called "Full Self Driving... capability" Like, the term FSD is used as part of a label for a collection of features, of which NOT A SINGLE ONE is even a COMPONENT of self driving, because EVERY SINGLE ONE requires full time driver attention. They're literally using the fact that theoretically, one day, the SENSORS MIGHT OVERLAP WITH WHAT FSD REQUIRES to sell it as... not FSD. FSD capability. What a joke. - Tesla has gotten away with homicide, and I guess we're ok with them continuing to. The useless comparisons about "Tesla with AP is safer than Tesla without", show me the comparison that Tesla with AP is safer than AEB+LKA+ACC (pretty much AP, minus the party trick that lulls drivers into a false sense of security), and I'll show you a made up study. Because that would be AP being exactly what it already is, minus the one mode where the driver is supposed to be a safety net for the computer. Where the driver already has responsibility to make sure it doesn't crash! It's literally like removing the ability to steer your bike with the training wheels, the training wheels are still there! It's simple really, Tesla has put marketability of a safety feature, over the actual safety benefits, at the cost of human lives.

waheoo 6y ago

Inattentive ADHD doeant work the way you think it does.

fudged71 6y ago
As someone diagnosed with ADHD who sometimes looks in the rear view mirror more often than I should, I have to challenge you here.
- waheoo 6y ago
  That isn't inattentive ADHD, thats just ADHD, and really sounds like a scenario in which this this camera tech should detect as a problem.

mlindner 6y ago

Before you go all conspiracy theory, try reading the actual article. It's an opt-in and the data is not recorded nor uploaded to Tesla without an opt-in control.

jerf 6y ago
We're like 300 yards down the slippery slope and gaining speed fast. Today's "It's opt-in and isn't being recorded" is tomorrow's "If you don't agree to allow us to use this video in any manner we deem fit, or if you leave 4G+ coverage for an excessive period of time, your car may not start".
- mlindner 6y ago
  We haven't been gaining speed here at all. Check your tinfoil hat at the door.

mikx007 6y ago

and thats why I drive Chevy Bolt!

ficklepickle 6y ago

This is a legit concern. There are many edge cases with humans. I worked at a pizza place in high school. There was a delivery driver with cerebral paulsy who was constantly being accused of being drunk. Sometimes customers just called the cops on him. It was sad, he was a super nice young guy already on a short clock and he had to deal with that all the time.