6 ms·

Tesla Autopilot system was on during fatal California crash, more safety concern

66 points by MilnerRoute 5y ago

Animats 5y ago
Yet another Tesla crash involving failure to detect a stationary obstacle on a road. Tesla has been killing people this way for years now.
- Someone1234 5y ago
  After the firetruck incident[0], semi across the road incident[1], and road separator incident[2] this isn't unreasonable to claim. What is odd is that modern Tesla (3, Y) vehicles have a better sensor suite than most other vehicles, and yet its AEB (Automatic Emergency Breaking) in isolation is seemingly worse than some other modern vehicles. I can tell you for a fact that Subaru's relatively primitive Eye Sight system based on two optical cameras in parallax (like the human eye, thus the name) will "see" the depth ahead and brake accordingly, it doesn't get confused by a bridges/road signs and reflective stationary vehicles. I've seen it do so frequently. A Tesla has significantly more sensors and more processing power but these problems continue. Everyone always gets distracted talking about Autopilot this and Autopilot that, but let's not, let's talk only about AEB and why Tesla is somehow both the best at advanced automatic driving and also somehow has uncompetitive AEB? Maybe it is time to take AEB out of Autopilot and make it its own system that is simpler but can also react to potential Autopilot errors? Or buy AEB off the shelf and put it side-by-side with Autopilot? [0] https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ [1] https://www.wptv.com/news/region-s-palm-beach-county/serious-crash-investigated-on-u-s-441-in-southern-palm-beach-county https://www.wptv.com/news/region-s-palm-beach-county/serious... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Mountain_View,_California_(March_23,_2018) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Mountain_View,...
  - rurounijones 5y ago
    I think the problem is that Tesla went all-in on optical sensors and relied on software instead of something "simple" like sticking a lidar on the front of the car. I am assuming a simple modern lidar and software package with a field of view limited to "What can the car hit if it keeps going straight" and connected to the AEB would be a pretty fool-proof way of stopping this but that might be too much cost for too limited an application.
    - jonathanpoulter 5y ago
      A pretty critical application
    - digikata 5y ago
      From what I’ve seen a relatively simple radar is what many automakers are using as the main sensor for AEB. You can see them on the front grille, usually a small rectangular patch in the plastic about the size of paperback book. Though those have had their problems too. Obviously easier for them to detect other vehicles but harder for pedestrians.
  - argonaut 5y ago
    Maybe AEB sucks because it's already a separate system from Autopilot, and therefore doesn't get much attention or engineering headcount. For example, this would explain why Autopark sucks and hasn't improved in years.
  - syrrim 5y ago
    I have to assume that tesla's cars aren't confused by those things either, for the most part. The difference is that most car's emergency brake systems act when a driver has failed to respond; the driver and the computer are acting in concert. Tesla has designed and marketed their system as if it worked separately from a focused driver. In the rare instances that their system fails, it is much less likely that the human driver has been paying attention and will brake manually. I just looked up the subaru system. In the emergency braking case, they clearly claim that their system acts only if the driver has failed to brake. That means, for example, that it will brake much more abruptly than a human would, since it is waiting for the last moment before braking. Their lane following technology behaves similarly. Tellingly, it is called "eyesight", suggesting it is merely an extra pair of eyes, rather than "autopilot", which suggests that it can drive on its own.
    - eightails 5y ago
      I think the points that have been raised in this thread are all quite valid. Just to add another: I wonder if Tesla's driver assistance systems has been designed to minimise false-positives in comparison with those of other manufacturers. When driving a friend's Subaru on a road trip a while ago we all commented on the lane-keeping alarm being overzealous, and ended up disabling it altogether to shut it up (this is on somewhat narrow b-roads). I've read of similar complaints from automotive journalists regarding various other manufacturers. In comparison, I've barely ever experienced false positives from the model 3's lane-keeping assist, even on similar roads -- maybe once or twice ever. Minimising false-positives is important for system efficacy, as otherwise people will simply disable it. But I do wonder if this comes at the expense of increasing the chance for false-negatives, which are far more dangerous. Is trading 100 false alarms for a single missed obstacle worth it? I'm not sure.
      - hanche 5y ago
        I drive a Kia e-Soul myself, and while I keep the lane keeping assist/alarm on most of the time, I definitely disable it on narrow, twisty roads. Otherwise, the alarm goes too often, especially when I move out closer to the shoulder to make room for meeting traffic.
  - Animats 5y ago
    After the firetruck incident[0], semi across the road incident[1], and road separator incident[2] Also the street sweeper incident [1], the overturned truck incident [2] ... There's a pattern here. [1] https://youtu.be/fc0yYJ8-Dyo https://youtu.be/fc0yYJ8-Dyo [2] https://youtu.be/X3hrKnv0dPQ https://youtu.be/X3hrKnv0dPQ
  - URSpider94 5y ago
    My guess is that Tesla is running an object classifier on the two front-facing cameras in parallel, and then measuring the parallax of the objects, not of the features of the image. As such, if it can’t recognize something in front of the car as a known object, then the car just plows into it. This is why a lot of the accidents involve things like side-on semis, overturned vehicles, and fire trucks - things that don’t look car-like. On top of that, they have to discard all of the radar data from objects moving at zero speed, because otherwise they’d be swamped out by the return from the road itself. So, the car has a literal blind spot for stationary objects in its path on the highway, unless it can recognize the object as a car with its cameras.
- dirkgently 5y ago
  And getting away with it.
- belltaco 5y ago
  >Tesla has been killing people this way for years now. Fo years? Article says 4 deaths. If they "have been killing people for years" one would assume you'd see higher numbers?
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Here are the top 10: https://www.autoinsurance.org/which-auto-makes-get-in-the-most-fatal-accidents/ https://www.autoinsurance.org/which-auto-makes-get-in-the-mo...
  - toast0 5y ago
    This is just a list of crashes by make, with no attempt to normalize by sales or registered vehicles or miles driven or anything. It's no surprise that the makes with the most sales and most vehicles registered and almost certainly most miles driven also have the most fatal collisions. I bet DeLorean has zero fatal collissions for most of the last ten years. Doesn't make it a good or safe car, just means the founder got caught (set up?) on drug charges and the company collapsed and there's not too many on the road.
  - eigen 5y ago
    as expected this tracks the number of cars sold. 2020 fatal crashes: #1 – Ford 21,262 #2 – Chevrolet 20,435 #3 – Toyota 12,918 #4 – Honda 10,969 #5 – Dodge 7,983 #6 – Nissan 7,956 #7 – GMC 4,533 #8 – Jeep 4,138 #9 – Hyundai 3,766 #10 – Kia 2,834 ... #41 – Tesla 62 2019 sales [1]: #1 – General Motors 2,886,904 #2 – Ford Motor Co 2,406,188 #3 – Toyota Motors 2,383,304 #4 – FCA US (Fiat, Chrysler, etc) 2,203,663 #5 – American Honda 1,608,170 #6 – Nissan-Mitsubishi 1,466,727 #7 – Hyundai-Kia 1,325,342 ... #13 - Tesla 192,250 also, the crashes is all model years so it favors less US market time. [1] https://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-analysis-2019-brands/ https://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-analysis-2019-brands/
    - slovette 5y ago
      So % of sold cars that end up in fatal crashes: Tesla: 0.0322% (or 1 in about 3100 cars sold) Ford: 0.8836% (or 1 in about 114 cars sold) Its late for me, so check my math, but I think it’s right.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  Isn’t it still likely overall safer to use, especially within its guidance (to keep hands on the wheel and eyes on the road)? I would imagine their self driving features have prevented many more accidents than they have caused.
  - syrrim 5y ago
    Most cars have AI technology to prevent crashes. What differentiates tesla is that they have technology that enables the driver to stop paying attention. Automatic braking has likely saved lives, but in this dimension it isn't clear that tesla has gone above and beyond other auto-makers. Enabling drivers to stop paying attention endangers them, and it is only in this dimension that tesla is clearly unique.
  - URSpider94 5y ago
    The data don’t bear that out. If you compare accident rates for highway miles, Tesla’s are not any safer than other cars, even though nearly all of them have autopilot.
- rasz 5y ago
  Their "autopilot ready" cars still ship with monocular center mounted vision system. I dont know what they are smoking there :/
colechristensen 5y ago
So is it going to be insurance or regulators that gets the dream of self driving squashed? Stories like this drive home the point: you can’t train your machine learning for every eventuality. Mimicking intelligence isn’t intelligence and the difference is demonstrated by the kinds of mistakes made.
- rconti 5y ago
  Probably regulators, because insurance companies are better at statistics.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    This. Self-driving risk is likely already comparable, if not significantly better, than human-driving risk, but even if it isn't, why would insurance companies care? They're the bookmakers, they don't really care which horse wins as long as they can reasonably accurately predict the odds. At worst insurance for cars with self-driving features becomes expensive. The one thing I could see insurances worry about is correlated risk. Imagine if an accidental push installs a bad development version of the autopilot on all cars instead of the 2 test vehicles with extra sensors, causing a much higher crash rate. Add a broken auto-update mechanism preventing a rollback, and it could take a day to mitigate and a week to fully stop the crashes, and during that time a lot of cars could crash. As long as it's no worse than the crashes resulting from e.g. a day with severe weather, it'll probably be fine, but if it significantly exceeds that, insuring self-driving cars could become too unpredictable, and thus too risky for insurance companies.
    - deschutes 5y ago
      How do you come to the conclusion that autopilot is safer? The Tesla press releases? It's the kind of uncritical analysis that you would expect from a company trying to market something. Food for thought: By considering only automated and mnual driving you exclude basically all possibilities. Hybrid systems that are designed around the limitations of humans and machines seem to be a much more promising but less flashy solution if safety is the goal. This approach has a long history if you consider things like ABS and the traffic fatality statistics suggest it actually works. (Crash mitigation technologies surely muddy the waters.)
xeromal 5y ago
Anyone care to copy the text?
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  http://archive.is/OjkPx http://archive.is/OjkPx you can put archive.is/https://anything.com https://anything.com to get or capture an archive!
  - xeromal 5y ago
    Wow. Thanks!
  - NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
    CAPTCHA'D Fucking cloudflare.
    - KirillPanov 5y ago
      Yeah the aggressiveness of archive.is's CAPTCHAs drives me nuts. Anything but a residential IP range (or maybe cellphone) gets hit. Not even a "one free request per IP per day" grace.
  - logbiscuitswave 5y ago
    Great tip. I just set up a Shortcut on iOS to automate this for future use.
- diebeforei485 5y ago
  California Highway Patrol has since send out a statement[1] saying they haven't determined what mode the car was driving in. https://twitter.com/sokane1/status/1393370592884232193?s=21 https://twitter.com/sokane1/status/1393370592884232193?s=21
ilaksh 5y ago
What version of the software? There are two main versions, FSD Beta and normal Autopilot. Also, normal Autopilot like most software is constantly receiving updates. People who want to stop Tesla from continuing on the basis of this crash might not understand how software is developed.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > People who want to stop Tesla from continuing on the basis of this crash might not understand how software is developed. Most software, even in places adhering to the least validation and testing-heavy agile processes, isn’t developed in a “move fast and murder people with defective products” approach.
williesleg 5y ago
Hey asshole it's an accident. Now if you want to go after those Mexicali agressive drivers without insurance, that'd be something wouldn't it?
United857 5y ago
Tesla autopilot in its current production form is NOT self-driving, and Tesla doesn't claim it is. It's L2 autonomy, adaptive cruise control with lane keeping (and traffic signal recognition in newer models). Driver attention is still required at all times. The marketing name is unfortunate, and leads to endless confusion in the media and the public. Edit: why the downvotes? I drive a Tesla, I use the system responsibly and nothing I've said is untrue.
- 0xEFF 5y ago
  It’s name is “autopilot.” There is no such thing as a “marketing name.” Edit: OK, there is such a thing. I guess this is why I never played the truenamer class. Point still stands.
- edoceo 5y ago
  > marketing name is unfortunate Did you say false advertising?
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > The marketing name is unfortunate, and leads to endless confusion in the media and the public. Well, yeah, but I have a feeling that “I’m feeling lucky” wouldn’t be as effective a marketing name, even if it was a less confusing one. Also, Google might get mad.
yawaworht1978 5y ago
With every one of these "auto pilot" crashes, the claim of " safer than humans" look more ridiculous. As of now, Tesla's "auto" pilot/maneuver into big, stationary objects, forgive me the pun. How does this stuff pass QA? And worse, how do the regulators look away? How many more will it take before an intervention happens?
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Is there even any regulatory framework for automated driving capabilities?
  - yawaworht1978 5y ago
    I would like to think this depends on jurisdiction. However, no jurisdiction should permit non human betaware on public roads under the disguise of self regulation.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      I’d go further; car manufacturers shouldn’t be allowed to self regulate, period.
  - URSpider94 5y ago
    Yes, there absolutely is. Fortunately, Tesla does not sell any automated driving capable cars. All of their systems are classified as “Level 2,” meaning that they are driver assistance systems and the human driver must always be in full command of the vehicle. To sell a higher level autonomous system, which today is only available in very limited trials e.g. Waymo, you have to collect massive amounts of safety data and submit to each state for approval. Now, back to Tesla - NHTSA is definitely watching them with interest, and if the data show that Tesla’s marketing is inducing people to not pay attention and have accidents, they will take action.
diebeforei485 5y ago
California Highway Patrol has now issued a statement[1] to the Associated Press (which originally reported this incident) saying they have not yet determined what driving mode the car was in. Perhaps the Washington Post should update their article? I know it's late on a Friday on the East Coast, but the truth is slow to get its pants on. https://twitter.com/sokane1/status/1393370592884232193?s=21 https://twitter.com/sokane1/status/1393370592884232193?s=21
elihu 5y ago
> In mid-April, a Tesla crashed into a tree in a suburb outside of Houston, and it took firefighters four hours to put out flames fueled by the car’s battery pack. When the fire was out, they concluded that neither of the car’s two occupants had been in the driver’s seat at the time of the crash. A Tesla executive later broke with that official account and claimed that a person had been in the driver’s seat. That "four hours to put out flames" is a bit of a stretch according to some of the reporting that came out later[1]. The fire was mostly out in about 10 minutes, but they had to keep pouring water on it until they could move the car and spray water more directly on the battery. This seems like sloppy/overly sensational reporting by the Washington Post. [1] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a36189237/tesla-model-s-fire-texas-crash-details-fire-chief/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a36189237/tesla-model-s-fi... edit: to be clear, I think Tesla deserves lots of criticism for autopilot failures that result in deaths; I just think the article is stating something as fact that's debatable.
chiefalchemist 5y ago
The question is: Of Tesla miles driven, Autopilot vs human, similar driving conditions, etc....how do the accident rates compare? Certainty there are non-AP accidents? There certainly could be less deaths, but for how many miles driven? I'm not defending Tesla, or AI. This is a simple and basic statistics question.
- bratcomplex 5y ago
  account for driving location + demographic and we should have a pretty clear answer
- URSpider94 5y ago
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/28/new-tesla-autopilot-statistics-show-its-almost-as-safe-driving-with-it-as-without/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/28/new-te... tl;dr - driving with AP on is very slightly less safe than driving with it on, probably by a statistically insignificant amount. It’s certainly not safer.
fallingmeat 5y ago
where is nhtsa? why are they still allowed to test this on public roadways with consumers operating it?
- URSpider94 5y ago
  Because they aren’t testing it, it’s a driver assistance system that is not capable of driving a car, and a human must always be in command of the vehicle. If a human were driving this car, they would have seen they were about to plow into an overturned car and hit the brakes or swerved. But that’s not how Tesla likes to market autopilot …
coolspot 5y ago
This site keeps track of every fatal accident involving a Tesla: https://www.tesladeaths.com/ https://www.tesladeaths.com/
- oldgradstudent 5y ago
  No, it tracks every fatal accident involving a Tesla reported on the news and came to the attention of the site maintainer. It is a lower bound on the number of fatal accidents involving a Tesla.
ppezaris 5y ago
Why do I feel like there is so much more attention paid to every Tesla accident? It's not news when a BMW or Mercedes has a fatal crash when their version of cruise control + lane keeping is active.
- sushid 5y ago
  Tesla is the only company that promised full self driving in < 1 year.

66 points by MilnerRoute 5y ago

Yet another Tesla crash involving failure to detect a stationary obstacle on a road. Tesla has been killing people this way for years now.

Someone1234 5y ago
After the firetruck incident[0], semi across the road incident[1], and road separator incident[2] this isn't unreasonable to claim. What is odd is that modern Tesla (3, Y) vehicles have a better sensor suite than most other vehicles, and yet its AEB (Automatic Emergency Breaking) in isolation is seemingly worse than some other modern vehicles. I can tell you for a fact that Subaru's relatively primitive Eye Sight system based on two optical cameras in parallax (like the human eye, thus the name) will "see" the depth ahead and brake accordingly, it doesn't get confused by a bridges/road signs and reflective stationary vehicles. I've seen it do so frequently. A Tesla has significantly more sensors and more processing power but these problems continue. Everyone always gets distracted talking about Autopilot this and Autopilot that, but let's not, let's talk only about AEB and why Tesla is somehow both the best at advanced automatic driving and also somehow has uncompetitive AEB? Maybe it is time to take AEB out of Autopilot and make it its own system that is simpler but can also react to potential Autopilot errors? Or buy AEB off the shelf and put it side-by-side with Autopilot? [0] https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ [1] https://www.wptv.com/news/region-s-palm-beach-county/serious-crash-investigated-on-u-s-441-in-southern-palm-beach-county https://www.wptv.com/news/region-s-palm-beach-county/serious... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Mountain_View,_California_(March_23,_2018) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Mountain_View,...
- rurounijones 5y ago
  I think the problem is that Tesla went all-in on optical sensors and relied on software instead of something "simple" like sticking a lidar on the front of the car. I am assuming a simple modern lidar and software package with a field of view limited to "What can the car hit if it keeps going straight" and connected to the AEB would be a pretty fool-proof way of stopping this but that might be too much cost for too limited an application.
  - jonathanpoulter 5y ago
    A pretty critical application
  - digikata 5y ago
    From what I’ve seen a relatively simple radar is what many automakers are using as the main sensor for AEB. You can see them on the front grille, usually a small rectangular patch in the plastic about the size of paperback book. Though those have had their problems too. Obviously easier for them to detect other vehicles but harder for pedestrians.
- argonaut 5y ago
  Maybe AEB sucks because it's already a separate system from Autopilot, and therefore doesn't get much attention or engineering headcount. For example, this would explain why Autopark sucks and hasn't improved in years.
- syrrim 5y ago
  I have to assume that tesla's cars aren't confused by those things either, for the most part. The difference is that most car's emergency brake systems act when a driver has failed to respond; the driver and the computer are acting in concert. Tesla has designed and marketed their system as if it worked separately from a focused driver. In the rare instances that their system fails, it is much less likely that the human driver has been paying attention and will brake manually. I just looked up the subaru system. In the emergency braking case, they clearly claim that their system acts only if the driver has failed to brake. That means, for example, that it will brake much more abruptly than a human would, since it is waiting for the last moment before braking. Their lane following technology behaves similarly. Tellingly, it is called "eyesight", suggesting it is merely an extra pair of eyes, rather than "autopilot", which suggests that it can drive on its own.
  - eightails 5y ago
    I think the points that have been raised in this thread are all quite valid. Just to add another: I wonder if Tesla's driver assistance systems has been designed to minimise false-positives in comparison with those of other manufacturers. When driving a friend's Subaru on a road trip a while ago we all commented on the lane-keeping alarm being overzealous, and ended up disabling it altogether to shut it up (this is on somewhat narrow b-roads). I've read of similar complaints from automotive journalists regarding various other manufacturers. In comparison, I've barely ever experienced false positives from the model 3's lane-keeping assist, even on similar roads -- maybe once or twice ever. Minimising false-positives is important for system efficacy, as otherwise people will simply disable it. But I do wonder if this comes at the expense of increasing the chance for false-negatives, which are far more dangerous. Is trading 100 false alarms for a single missed obstacle worth it? I'm not sure.
    - hanche 5y ago
      I drive a Kia e-Soul myself, and while I keep the lane keeping assist/alarm on most of the time, I definitely disable it on narrow, twisty roads. Otherwise, the alarm goes too often, especially when I move out closer to the shoulder to make room for meeting traffic.
- Animats 5y ago
  After the firetruck incident[0], semi across the road incident[1], and road separator incident[2] Also the street sweeper incident [1], the overturned truck incident [2] ... There's a pattern here. [1] https://youtu.be/fc0yYJ8-Dyo https://youtu.be/fc0yYJ8-Dyo [2] https://youtu.be/X3hrKnv0dPQ https://youtu.be/X3hrKnv0dPQ
- URSpider94 5y ago
  My guess is that Tesla is running an object classifier on the two front-facing cameras in parallel, and then measuring the parallax of the objects, not of the features of the image. As such, if it can’t recognize something in front of the car as a known object, then the car just plows into it. This is why a lot of the accidents involve things like side-on semis, overturned vehicles, and fire trucks - things that don’t look car-like. On top of that, they have to discard all of the radar data from objects moving at zero speed, because otherwise they’d be swamped out by the return from the road itself. So, the car has a literal blind spot for stationary objects in its path on the highway, unless it can recognize the object as a car with its cameras.
dirkgently 5y ago
And getting away with it.
belltaco 5y ago
>Tesla has been killing people this way for years now. Fo years? Article says 4 deaths. If they "have been killing people for years" one would assume you'd see higher numbers?
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Here are the top 10: https://www.autoinsurance.org/which-auto-makes-get-in-the-most-fatal-accidents/ https://www.autoinsurance.org/which-auto-makes-get-in-the-mo...
- toast0 5y ago
  This is just a list of crashes by make, with no attempt to normalize by sales or registered vehicles or miles driven or anything. It's no surprise that the makes with the most sales and most vehicles registered and almost certainly most miles driven also have the most fatal collisions. I bet DeLorean has zero fatal collissions for most of the last ten years. Doesn't make it a good or safe car, just means the founder got caught (set up?) on drug charges and the company collapsed and there's not too many on the road.
- eigen 5y ago
  as expected this tracks the number of cars sold. 2020 fatal crashes: #1 – Ford 21,262 #2 – Chevrolet 20,435 #3 – Toyota 12,918 #4 – Honda 10,969 #5 – Dodge 7,983 #6 – Nissan 7,956 #7 – GMC 4,533 #8 – Jeep 4,138 #9 – Hyundai 3,766 #10 – Kia 2,834 ... #41 – Tesla 62 2019 sales [1]: #1 – General Motors 2,886,904 #2 – Ford Motor Co 2,406,188 #3 – Toyota Motors 2,383,304 #4 – FCA US (Fiat, Chrysler, etc) 2,203,663 #5 – American Honda 1,608,170 #6 – Nissan-Mitsubishi 1,466,727 #7 – Hyundai-Kia 1,325,342 ... #13 - Tesla 192,250 also, the crashes is all model years so it favors less US market time. [1] https://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-analysis-2019-brands/ https://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-analysis-2019-brands/
  - slovette 5y ago
    So % of sold cars that end up in fatal crashes: Tesla: 0.0322% (or 1 in about 3100 cars sold) Ford: 0.8836% (or 1 in about 114 cars sold) Its late for me, so check my math, but I think it’s right.
throwawaysea 5y ago
Isn’t it still likely overall safer to use, especially within its guidance (to keep hands on the wheel and eyes on the road)? I would imagine their self driving features have prevented many more accidents than they have caused.
- syrrim 5y ago
  Most cars have AI technology to prevent crashes. What differentiates tesla is that they have technology that enables the driver to stop paying attention. Automatic braking has likely saved lives, but in this dimension it isn't clear that tesla has gone above and beyond other auto-makers. Enabling drivers to stop paying attention endangers them, and it is only in this dimension that tesla is clearly unique.
- URSpider94 5y ago
  The data don’t bear that out. If you compare accident rates for highway miles, Tesla’s are not any safer than other cars, even though nearly all of them have autopilot.
rasz 5y ago
Their "autopilot ready" cars still ship with monocular center mounted vision system. I dont know what they are smoking there :/

colechristensen 5y ago

So is it going to be insurance or regulators that gets the dream of self driving squashed? Stories like this drive home the point: you can’t train your machine learning for every eventuality. Mimicking intelligence isn’t intelligence and the difference is demonstrated by the kinds of mistakes made.

rconti 5y ago
Probably regulators, because insurance companies are better at statistics.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  This. Self-driving risk is likely already comparable, if not significantly better, than human-driving risk, but even if it isn't, why would insurance companies care? They're the bookmakers, they don't really care which horse wins as long as they can reasonably accurately predict the odds. At worst insurance for cars with self-driving features becomes expensive. The one thing I could see insurances worry about is correlated risk. Imagine if an accidental push installs a bad development version of the autopilot on all cars instead of the 2 test vehicles with extra sensors, causing a much higher crash rate. Add a broken auto-update mechanism preventing a rollback, and it could take a day to mitigate and a week to fully stop the crashes, and during that time a lot of cars could crash. As long as it's no worse than the crashes resulting from e.g. a day with severe weather, it'll probably be fine, but if it significantly exceeds that, insuring self-driving cars could become too unpredictable, and thus too risky for insurance companies.
  - deschutes 5y ago
    How do you come to the conclusion that autopilot is safer? The Tesla press releases? It's the kind of uncritical analysis that you would expect from a company trying to market something. Food for thought: By considering only automated and mnual driving you exclude basically all possibilities. Hybrid systems that are designed around the limitations of humans and machines seem to be a much more promising but less flashy solution if safety is the goal. This approach has a long history if you consider things like ABS and the traffic fatality statistics suggest it actually works. (Crash mitigation technologies surely muddy the waters.)

xeromal 5y ago

Anyone care to copy the text?

dillondoyle 5y ago
http://archive.is/OjkPx http://archive.is/OjkPx you can put archive.is/https://anything.com https://anything.com to get or capture an archive!
- xeromal 5y ago
  Wow. Thanks!
- NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  CAPTCHA'D Fucking cloudflare.
  - KirillPanov 5y ago
    Yeah the aggressiveness of archive.is's CAPTCHAs drives me nuts. Anything but a residential IP range (or maybe cellphone) gets hit. Not even a "one free request per IP per day" grace.
- logbiscuitswave 5y ago
  Great tip. I just set up a Shortcut on iOS to automate this for future use.
diebeforei485 5y ago
California Highway Patrol has since send out a statement[1] saying they haven't determined what mode the car was driving in. https://twitter.com/sokane1/status/1393370592884232193?s=21 https://twitter.com/sokane1/status/1393370592884232193?s=21

ilaksh 5y ago

What version of the software? There are two main versions, FSD Beta and normal Autopilot. Also, normal Autopilot like most software is constantly receiving updates. People who want to stop Tesla from continuing on the basis of this crash might not understand how software is developed.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> People who want to stop Tesla from continuing on the basis of this crash might not understand how software is developed. Most software, even in places adhering to the least validation and testing-heavy agile processes, isn’t developed in a “move fast and murder people with defective products” approach.

williesleg 5y ago

Hey asshole it's an accident. Now if you want to go after those Mexicali agressive drivers without insurance, that'd be something wouldn't it?

United857 5y ago

Tesla autopilot in its current production form is NOT self-driving, and Tesla doesn't claim it is. It's L2 autonomy, adaptive cruise control with lane keeping (and traffic signal recognition in newer models). Driver attention is still required at all times. The marketing name is unfortunate, and leads to endless confusion in the media and the public. Edit: why the downvotes? I drive a Tesla, I use the system responsibly and nothing I've said is untrue.

0xEFF 5y ago
It’s name is “autopilot.” There is no such thing as a “marketing name.” Edit: OK, there is such a thing. I guess this is why I never played the truenamer class. Point still stands.
edoceo 5y ago
> marketing name is unfortunate Did you say false advertising?
dragonwriter 5y ago
> The marketing name is unfortunate, and leads to endless confusion in the media and the public. Well, yeah, but I have a feeling that “I’m feeling lucky” wouldn’t be as effective a marketing name, even if it was a less confusing one. Also, Google might get mad.

yawaworht1978 5y ago

With every one of these "auto pilot" crashes, the claim of " safer than humans" look more ridiculous. As of now, Tesla's "auto" pilot/maneuver into big, stationary objects, forgive me the pun. How does this stuff pass QA? And worse, how do the regulators look away? How many more will it take before an intervention happens?

ashtonkem 5y ago
Is there even any regulatory framework for automated driving capabilities?
- yawaworht1978 5y ago
  I would like to think this depends on jurisdiction. However, no jurisdiction should permit non human betaware on public roads under the disguise of self regulation.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    I’d go further; car manufacturers shouldn’t be allowed to self regulate, period.
- URSpider94 5y ago
  Yes, there absolutely is. Fortunately, Tesla does not sell any automated driving capable cars. All of their systems are classified as “Level 2,” meaning that they are driver assistance systems and the human driver must always be in full command of the vehicle. To sell a higher level autonomous system, which today is only available in very limited trials e.g. Waymo, you have to collect massive amounts of safety data and submit to each state for approval. Now, back to Tesla - NHTSA is definitely watching them with interest, and if the data show that Tesla’s marketing is inducing people to not pay attention and have accidents, they will take action.

diebeforei485 5y ago

California Highway Patrol has now issued a statement[1] to the Associated Press (which originally reported this incident) saying they have not yet determined what driving mode the car was in. Perhaps the Washington Post should update their article? I know it's late on a Friday on the East Coast, but the truth is slow to get its pants on. https://twitter.com/sokane1/status/1393370592884232193?s=21 https://twitter.com/sokane1/status/1393370592884232193?s=21

elihu 5y ago

> In mid-April, a Tesla crashed into a tree in a suburb outside of Houston, and it took firefighters four hours to put out flames fueled by the car’s battery pack. When the fire was out, they concluded that neither of the car’s two occupants had been in the driver’s seat at the time of the crash. A Tesla executive later broke with that official account and claimed that a person had been in the driver’s seat. That "four hours to put out flames" is a bit of a stretch according to some of the reporting that came out later[1]. The fire was mostly out in about 10 minutes, but they had to keep pouring water on it until they could move the car and spray water more directly on the battery. This seems like sloppy/overly sensational reporting by the Washington Post. [1] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a36189237/tesla-model-s-fire-texas-crash-details-fire-chief/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a36189237/tesla-model-s-fi... edit: to be clear, I think Tesla deserves lots of criticism for autopilot failures that result in deaths; I just think the article is stating something as fact that's debatable.

chiefalchemist 5y ago

The question is: Of Tesla miles driven, Autopilot vs human, similar driving conditions, etc....how do the accident rates compare? Certainty there are non-AP accidents? There certainly could be less deaths, but for how many miles driven? I'm not defending Tesla, or AI. This is a simple and basic statistics question.

bratcomplex 5y ago
account for driving location + demographic and we should have a pretty clear answer
URSpider94 5y ago
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/28/new-tesla-autopilot-statistics-show-its-almost-as-safe-driving-with-it-as-without/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/28/new-te... tl;dr - driving with AP on is very slightly less safe than driving with it on, probably by a statistically insignificant amount. It’s certainly not safer.

fallingmeat 5y ago

where is nhtsa? why are they still allowed to test this on public roadways with consumers operating it?

URSpider94 5y ago
Because they aren’t testing it, it’s a driver assistance system that is not capable of driving a car, and a human must always be in command of the vehicle. If a human were driving this car, they would have seen they were about to plow into an overturned car and hit the brakes or swerved. But that’s not how Tesla likes to market autopilot …

coolspot 5y ago

This site keeps track of every fatal accident involving a Tesla: https://www.tesladeaths.com/ https://www.tesladeaths.com/

oldgradstudent 5y ago
No, it tracks every fatal accident involving a Tesla reported on the news and came to the attention of the site maintainer. It is a lower bound on the number of fatal accidents involving a Tesla.

ppezaris 5y ago

Why do I feel like there is so much more attention paid to every Tesla accident? It's not news when a BMW or Mercedes has a fatal crash when their version of cruise control + lane keeping is active.

sushid 5y ago
Tesla is the only company that promised full self driving in < 1 year.