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"Witnesses claim the man behind the wheel and his passenger were asleep with their seats fully reclined, as their Tesla travelled up to 150 km/h on the freeway

"Witnesses claim the man behind the wheel and his passenger were asleep with their seats fully reclined, as their Tesla travelled up to 150 km/h on the freeway near Ponoka..." Given this and the man's other past incidents, the Tesla was only a minor contributing factor in the guy's global stupidity and danger that he inflicts on the world daily? Edit: Btw, what would be the end accident scenario here? Presuming that the car wouldn't hit any other car on the road, would it lose control on a curve that was too tight for the speed, or fail at the end of the freeway or something? Would it alarm and then come to a gradual stop? Not a Tesla owner here.

vmception 6y ago
Tesla's have crashed and obliterated their owners, even right here in California on major highways on the way to their Silicon Valley office park. Alarmed engineers taking the exact same route to reproduce the bug successfully.
gambiting 6y ago
"Presuming that the car wouldn't hit any other car on the road" - it absolutely would though. The tech is good enough to avoid hitting another car that slows down in front of you, but if someone was broken down(and fully stopped) in your lane, the car will hit them at full speed. It might start breaking just before impact, but not fast enough to slow you down from 150km/h. No self driving or adaptive cruise tech can save you from this situation, because they are all trained to ignore fully stationary objects. I've also seen situations where road markings disappear on the road for whatever reason and Tesla goes from being 100% confident and in control to "take over the wheel NOW" in about 1 second flat. Best case scenario here is that the car would eventually realize that you aren't in control and come to a gradual stop - the problem there is that now he is fully stopped on an active highway and chances of getting plowed from the rear are astronomical. I think the biggest problem with all of these self driving systems is that in cars they can require you to be fully 100% aware of your surroundings and take over in a split second. People compare it to plane autopilot, but I don't think that's quite right - in a plane, you will have at least a minute or two before you hit the ground, even if the plane takes a straight nose dive. In a car, you go from being fine to being headed for a head-on collision in no time at all.
- anonu 6y ago
  This [1] was the famous 2016 crash where a Tesla broad-sided a basically stationary semi-truck. Are you suggesting Tesla hasn't solved this type of problem yet? [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-crash/tesla-driver-in-fatal-autopilot-crash-got-numerous-warnings-u-s-government-idUSKBN19A2XC https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-crash/tesla-driver-...
  - gambiting 6y ago
    Yes, of course Tesla hasn't solved it yet, because no one has, and in fact it probably isn't possible to solve without some magic tech that doesn't exist yet - it might be possible to fix with LIDAR, but obviously Tesla doesn't have it. All of these systems have to ignore stationary objects ahead of them, or the car would be emergency braking in too many daily situations to be usable. Simple case, at 150km/h you are travelling at 41m/s. The stopping distance at that speed is roughly given as 130m[0]. So the car would need to see and recognize objects at least ~150m ahead to stop autonomously from that speed. That's just physically not possible, the cameras on the Tesla don't have enough resolution to do such a recognition. Instead, a radar-based distance measure is used - but again, even if the car detects that you are rapidly approaching "something" 150m ahead of you, that information is nearly useless. At that distance, you cannot differentiate between a stopped car 150m ahead of you, an overhead sign, or a large rock next to your lane which poses absolutely no danger whatsoever - it all gives the same signature. LIDAR doesn't have that range either. And then of course even if the car could reasonably detect that there is something ahead of you that you are absolutely 100% definitely heading towards, it has no idea if the road doesn't curve in such a way that you would avoid it. Famous case of adaptive cruise systems freaking out at bends, because according to the radar/image recognition you are CLEARLY heading for that telephone pole standing next to the road - but of course the road curves so you aren't actually going to hit it. Problems like that. [0] https://www.random-science-tools.com/physics/stopping-distance.htm https://www.random-science-tools.com/physics/stopping-distan...
    - jessaustin 6y ago
      Aren't there fully self-driving vehicles undergoing testing on normal city streets with stoplights? We could say that's a different mode than high-speed highway driving, but there are a number of locations where those modes blend into each other. Are the experimenters extra careful to avoid those locations? How long before the tech exists to address this issue?

vmception 6y ago

Tesla's have crashed and obliterated their owners, even right here in California on major highways on the way to their Silicon Valley office park. Alarmed engineers taking the exact same route to reproduce the bug successfully.

gambiting 6y ago

"Presuming that the car wouldn't hit any other car on the road" - it absolutely would though. The tech is good enough to avoid hitting another car that slows down in front of you, but if someone was broken down(and fully stopped) in your lane, the car will hit them at full speed. It might start breaking just before impact, but not fast enough to slow you down from 150km/h. No self driving or adaptive cruise tech can save you from this situation, because they are all trained to ignore fully stationary objects. I've also seen situations where road markings disappear on the road for whatever reason and Tesla goes from being 100% confident and in control to "take over the wheel NOW" in about 1 second flat. Best case scenario here is that the car would eventually realize that you aren't in control and come to a gradual stop - the problem there is that now he is fully stopped on an active highway and chances of getting plowed from the rear are astronomical. I think the biggest problem with all of these self driving systems is that in cars they can require you to be fully 100% aware of your surroundings and take over in a split second. People compare it to plane autopilot, but I don't think that's quite right - in a plane, you will have at least a minute or two before you hit the ground, even if the plane takes a straight nose dive. In a car, you go from being fine to being headed for a head-on collision in no time at all.

anonu 6y ago
This [1] was the famous 2016 crash where a Tesla broad-sided a basically stationary semi-truck. Are you suggesting Tesla hasn't solved this type of problem yet? [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-crash/tesla-driver-in-fatal-autopilot-crash-got-numerous-warnings-u-s-government-idUSKBN19A2XC https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-crash/tesla-driver-...
- gambiting 6y ago
  Yes, of course Tesla hasn't solved it yet, because no one has, and in fact it probably isn't possible to solve without some magic tech that doesn't exist yet - it might be possible to fix with LIDAR, but obviously Tesla doesn't have it. All of these systems have to ignore stationary objects ahead of them, or the car would be emergency braking in too many daily situations to be usable. Simple case, at 150km/h you are travelling at 41m/s. The stopping distance at that speed is roughly given as 130m[0]. So the car would need to see and recognize objects at least ~150m ahead to stop autonomously from that speed. That's just physically not possible, the cameras on the Tesla don't have enough resolution to do such a recognition. Instead, a radar-based distance measure is used - but again, even if the car detects that you are rapidly approaching "something" 150m ahead of you, that information is nearly useless. At that distance, you cannot differentiate between a stopped car 150m ahead of you, an overhead sign, or a large rock next to your lane which poses absolutely no danger whatsoever - it all gives the same signature. LIDAR doesn't have that range either. And then of course even if the car could reasonably detect that there is something ahead of you that you are absolutely 100% definitely heading towards, it has no idea if the road doesn't curve in such a way that you would avoid it. Famous case of adaptive cruise systems freaking out at bends, because according to the radar/image recognition you are CLEARLY heading for that telephone pole standing next to the road - but of course the road curves so you aren't actually going to hit it. Problems like that. [0] https://www.random-science-tools.com/physics/stopping-distance.htm https://www.random-science-tools.com/physics/stopping-distan...
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    Aren't there fully self-driving vehicles undergoing testing on normal city streets with stoplights? We could say that's a different mode than high-speed highway driving, but there are a number of locations where those modes blend into each other. Are the experimenters extra careful to avoid those locations? How long before the tech exists to address this issue?