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U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• gundmc 5y ago
  This is why I believe the approach of incremental improvement towards full self driving is fundamentally flawed. These advanced driver assist tools are good enough to lull users into a false sense of security. No amount of "but our terms and conditions say you need to always pay attention!" will overcome human nature building that trust and dependence.
  • judge2020 5y ago
    Your reasoning doesn’t apply to the incremental improvements to self-driving, rather Tesla’s decision to allow all cars to use TACC/auto-steer. They haven’t even given people “the button” to enroll in FSD beta, likely because they know it would be extremely bad PR when a bunch of people use it without paying attention.
  • nathias 5y ago
    that's not human nature, that's user stupidity
    • weird-eye-issue 5y ago
      What's the... Difference?
      • nathias 5y ago
        One is a permanent property of our nature the other a choice.
        • weird-eye-issue 5y ago
          No, one is a fact and the other is a consequence
    • formerly_proven 5y ago
      The design is fine, it's all the users who are idiots. P.S. /s. Obviously, Mr. Poe.
      • rvz 5y ago
        Well they did not 'pay' attention. They 'paid' for the "Fools Self Driving" package. This is why 'attention' and 'driver monitoring' was not included.
      • salawat 5y ago
        T. Every maligned designer when someone points out a flaw It's okay. I do it too. Really need to work on seeing yourself making that argument as a starting point and not an endpoint.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • mnmmn123456 5y ago
    Today, there is at least one of the most advanced Neural Networks entering each car: A human being. If we could just implement the AI to add to this person and not replace it...
    • salawat 5y ago
      This is the bit nobody likes to realize. FSD at it's best...is still about as fallible as a human driver. Minus free will (it is hoped). I will be amused, intrigued, and possibly a bit horrified if by the time FSD hits level 5, and they stick with the Neural Net of Neural Nets architecture if there isn't a rash of system induced variance in behavior as emergent phenomena take shape. Imagined news: All Tesla's on I-95 engaged in creating patterns whereby all non-Teala traffic was bordered by a Tesla on each side. Almost like a game of Go, says expert. Researchers stumped. Then again, that's imply you had an NN capable of retraining itself on the fly to some limited degree, which I assume no one sane would put into service... Hopefully this comment doesn't suffer a date of not aging well.
    • ben_w 5y ago
      What would such an AI even look like? If it spots every real danger but also hallucinates even a few dangers that aren’t really there, it gets ignored or switched off for needlessly slowing the traveler down (false positives, apparently an issue with early Google examples [0]); if it only spots real dangers but misses most of them, it is not helping (false negatives, even worse if a human is blindly assuming the machine knows best and what happened with e.g. Uber [1]); if it’s about the same as humans overall but makes different types of mistake, people rely on it right up until it crashes then go apoplectic because it didn’t see something any human would consider obvious (e.g. Tesla, which gets slightly safer when the AI is active, but people keep showing the AI getting confused about things that they consider obvious [2]). [0] https://theoatmeal.com/blog/google_self_driving_car https://theoatmeal.com/blog/google_self_driving_car [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg [2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=Wz6Ins1D9ak https://youtube.com/watch?v=Wz6Ins1D9ak
  • cmpb 5y ago
    I disagree. One feature my car has is to pull me back into the lane when I veer out of it (Subaru's lane keep assist). That is still incremental improvement towards "full self driving". I agree, however, that Tesla's Autopilot is not functional enough, and any tool designed to allow humans to remove their hands from the wheel should not require their immediate attention in any way.
    • tapoxi 5y ago
      I think people just assume Tesla's Autopilot is more capable than it really is. My car has adaptive cruise control and lane keep assist, but I'm not relying on either for anything more complex than sipping a drink while on the highway.
      • rmckayfleming 5y ago
        Yep, if anything they’re just a way to make long drives or stop and go highway traffic more tolerable. When I got my first car with those features it seemed like a gimmick, but they really help to reduce fatigue.
    • Robotbeat 5y ago
      Tesla’s autopilot does not allow you to remove your hands from the wheel. You must keep them on, and apply torque occasionally, to keep it engaged.
      • Karunamon 5y ago
        In reality, it'll let you get away with going handsfree for upwards of 30 seconds. That's more than long enough to lose your attention.
    • darkerside 5y ago
      I think that's actually a step towards a local maximum that makes us less likely to achieve actual FSD. The safer we can make AI-guided driving where a person is still in control, the higher the bar becomes for a solo AI to be significantly safer than the alternatives.
  • mrfusion 5y ago
    I’d be curious if there are studies out there on how to do automated assists in machines that require vigilance that don’t have this problem.
    • jdavis703 5y ago
      Both airplanes and trains have automated “assist.” At least in the case of WMATA they give up on automatic train control after a fatal crash.
      • userbinator 5y ago
        In a plane you also have far more time to react once the autopilot disconnects for whatever reason, than the fraction of a second that a car gives you.
        • jdavis703 5y ago
          Then the automation needs to be more conservative in its ability and request intervention sooner.
      • merrywhether 5y ago
        This is a misrepresentation of the dumpster fire that was the WMATA train situation. Yes, the fatal crash was the last straw, but the root problem was not the automation system but rather the complete lack of maintenance that led to its inability to work properly. Congress refusing to fund maintenance and then falling behind 10-15 years on it lead to all kinds of systems failing. The fatal fire in the blue line tunnel under the river occurred with a human at the controls, but we’re similarly not blaming that incident on the perils of human operation.
        • jdavis703 5y ago
          I don’t blame the operator for the crash. The other train was behind a blind curve and she hit the emergency brake within a reasonable amount of time given what she could see. However the speeds of the system were set too high for the operator to safely stop because they assumed the ATC would work perfectly.
  • Waterluvian 5y ago
    I have a Subaru Forester base model with lane keeping and adaptive cruise control. I need to be touching the wheel and applying some force to it or it begins yelling at me and eventually brings me slowly to a stop. I’ve had it for a year now and I cannot perceive of a way, without physically altering the system (like hanging a weight from the wheel maybe?) that would allow me to stop being an active participant. I think the opposite is true: Tesla’s move fast and kill people approach is the mistake. Incremental mastering of autonomous capabilities is the way to go.
    • tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
      Tesla had a similar system, and > physically altering the system (like hanging a weight from the wheel maybe?) was exactly what people were doing. But it's also possible to be physically present, applying force, but being "zoned out", even without malicious intent.
      • johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
        >But it's also possible to be physically present, applying force, but being "zoned out", even without malicious intent. I've occasionally noticed myself zoning out behind the wheel of my non-self-driving car as well. It's actually very common. [0] [0] https://www.actuarialpost.co.uk/article/quarter-of-fatal-crashes-due-to-falling-asleep-at-the-wheel-15162.htm https://www.actuarialpost.co.uk/article/quarter-of-fatal-cra...
      • FireBeyond 5y ago
        It also previously required only 15 minutes between steering wheel contacts.
    • shakna 5y ago
      > I need to be touching the wheel and applying some force to it or it begins yelling at me and eventually brings me slowly to a stop. > I’ve had it for a year now and I cannot perceive of a way, without physically altering the system (like hanging a weight from the wheel maybe?) that would allow me to stop being an active participant. That's exactly what people were doing with the Tesla. Hanging a weight to ensure the safety system doesn't kick in. [0][1] [0] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/28/cars/tesla-texas-crash-autopilot/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/28/cars/tesla-texas-crash-au... [1] https://twitter.com/ItsKimJava/status/1388240600491859968/photo/2 https://twitter.com/ItsKimJava/status/1388240600491859968/ph...
  • tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    It depends. As long as the resulting package (flawed self driving system + the average driver) isn't significantly more dangerous than the average unassisted human driver, I don't consider it irresponsible to deploy it. "The average driver" includes everyone, ranging from drivers using it as intended with close supervision, drivers who become inattentive because nothing is happening, and drivers who think it's a reasonable idea to climb into the back seat with a water bottle duct taped to the steering wheel to bypass the sensor. OTOH, the average driver for the unassisted scenario also includes the driver who thinks they're able to drive a car while texting.
    • TacticalCoder 5y ago
      > As long as the resulting package (flawed self driving system + the average driver) isn't significantly more dangerous than the average unassisted human driver... Shouldn't that compared to "average driver + myriad of modern little safety features" instead of "average unassisted driver"? The one who has the means to drive a Tesla with the "full driving" mode certain has the means to buy, say, a Toyota full of assistance/safety features (lane change assist, unwanted lane change warning and whatnots).
      • politician 5y ago
        Why isn’t defeating the self-driving attention controls a crime like reckless driving? Isn’t that the obvious solution?
        • rcxdude 5y ago
          Gonna be pretty difficult to enforce. Many US states don't even enforce a minimum roadworthiness of cars on the roads.
          • politician 5y ago
            Does that even matter? If the state doesn’t care to enforce its laws against reckless driving, why should the manufacturer be encumbered with that responsibility?
  • Robotbeat 5y ago
    I actually disagree. (And before you respond, please read my post because it’s not a trivial point.) The fact that an huge formal investigation happened with just a single casualty is proof that it may actually be superior for safety in the long-term (when combined with feedback from regulators and government investigators). One death in conventional vehicles is irrelevant. But because of the high profile of Tesla’s technology, it garners a bunch of attention from the public and therefore regulators. This is PRECISELY the dynamic that led to the ridiculously safe airline record. The safer it is, the more that rare deaths will be investigated and the causes sussed out and fixed by industry and regulators together. Perhaps industry/Tesla/whoever hates the regulators and investigations. But I think they are precisely what will cause self driving to become ever safer, and eventually become as safe as industry/Tesla claims, safer than human drivers while also being cheap and ubiquitous. Just like airline travel today. A remarkable combination of safety and affordability. This might be the only way to ever do it. I don’t think the airline industry could’ve ever gotten to current levels of safety by testing everything on closed airfields and over empty land for hundreds of millions of flight hours before they had sufficient statistics to be equal to today. It can’t happen without regulators and enforcement, either.
    • 3pt14159 5y ago
      I largely agree with you, but I just wish regulators would start by only allowing these assist programs for people that are already known to be poor drivers. The elderly and convicted drunk drivers, for example. That way we could have the best of both worlds.
      • lastofthemojito 5y ago
        Incentivizing drunk driving seems dangerous.
        • joshgrib 5y ago
          Requiring people to buy a special car/system to be able to drive doesn't seem like an incentive - it seems similar to the interlock system we currently require drunk drivers to purchase to be able to drive. If anything a driver monitoring system seems even better than the interlock system, for example you couldn't have your kids/friends blow for you to bypass it.
  • fzzzy 5y ago
    Do you hate regular cruise control? How is that not partial self driving?
    • ghaff 5y ago
      To tell you the truth, I generally do and haven't used it for ages. Where I drive, the roads have some amount of traffic. I find (traditional) cruise control encourages driving at a constant speed to a degree that I wouldn't as a driver with a foot on the gas. So I don't "hate" regular cruise control but I basically never use it.
      • hcurtiss 5y ago
        I think you are in a distinct minority.
        • ghaff 5y ago
          Maybe a fairly small sample size but I don't know the last time I've been in a car where the driver has turned on cruise control. But it probably varies by area of the country. In the Northeast, there's just enough traffic in general that it's not worth it for me.
          • minhazm 5y ago
            In traffic is where traffic aware cruise control is most useful. A lot of people I knew who bought Tesla's in the bay area specifically bought it so their commutes would be less stressful with the bumper to bumper traffic. I drove 3000+ miles across the country last year with > 90% of it on AP and I was way less tired with AP on vs off and it allowed me to just stay focused on the road and look out for any issues.
            • ghaff 5y ago
              Yes. I was (explicitly) talking about traditional "dumb" cruise control. I haven't used adaptive cruise control but I agree it sounds more useful than traditional cruise control once you get above minimal traffic.
  • helsinkiandrew 5y ago
    > you need to always pay attention That is the fatal flaw in anything but a perfect system - any kind of system that is taking the decisions about steering from the driver is going to result in the driver at best thinking about other things and worse getting into the back seat to change. If you had to develop a system to make sure someone was paying attention, you wouldn't make them sit in a warm comfy seat looking at a screen - you would make them actively engage with what they were looking at - like steering. And ultimately it doesn't matter how many hundreds of thousands of hours of driving you teach your system with, it may eventually be able to learn about parked cars, kerbs and road signs, but there won't be enough examples of different accidents and how emergency vehicles behave to ever make it behave safely. Humans can cope with driving emergencies fairly well (not perfectly admittedly) no matter how many they've been involved in using logic and higher level reasoning.
  • swiley 5y ago
    We have an education problem. People have no idea what computers do because they're illiterate (literacy would mean knowing at least one language well enough to read and write in it) so they just take other people's word that they can do some magical thing with software updates. The most extreme examples of this were the iPhone hoaxes telling people that software updates provided waterproofing or microwave charging.
  • backtoyoujim 5y ago
    I mean there are videos of a vehicle's occupant sitting in the rear seats making food and drinks while the vehicles are tricked into operating off of the vehicles sensors. It is not solely the trust and dependence but inclusive is the group of idiots with access to wealth without regard to human life.
  • bishoprook2 5y ago
    I expect that to design self-driving you need to push the limits (with some accidents) a bit with a bunch of telemetry. Going from not-much to full-self-driving requires a lot of design increments.
  • antattack 5y ago
    All Level 2 systems need to better integrate with the driver. Upon engagement driver and driver assist are team where communication and predictability is crucial.
  • dalbasal 5y ago
    I think the fundamental flaw is indisputable. Everyone is aware of in-between stage problems. I don't think it's an insurmountable flaw. These things are on the road already. They have issues, but so do human only cars. Tweaks probably get made, like some special handling of emergency vehicle scenarios. But, it's not enough to stop it. Meanwhile, it's not a permanent state. Self driving technology is advancing, becoming more common on roads. Procedures, as well as infrastructure, is growing around the existence of self driven cars. Human supervisor or not, the way these things use the road affects the design of roads. If your emergency speed sign isn't being headed by self driven cars, your emergency speed sign has a bug.
  • api 5y ago
    Full self driving is one of those things where getting 80% of the way there will take 20% of the effort and getting the remaining 20% of the way there will take 80% of the effort. Tesla auto-drive seems like it's about 80% of the way there.
  • Baeocystin 5y ago
    I remember reading Donald Norman's books decades ago, and one of the prime examples of the dangers of automation in cars was adaptive cruise control- which would then suddenly accelerate forward in a now-clear off-ramp, surprising the heck out of the previously-complacent driver, and leading to accidents. We've known for a very long time that this sort of automation/manual control handoff failure is a very big deal, and yet there seems to be an almost willful blindness from the manufacturers to address it in a meaningful way.
  • dheera 5y ago
    Is it? Tesla is still alive because they're selling cars. It's just that the companies that are NOT doing incremental approaches are largely at the mercy of some investors who don't know a thing about self-driving, and they may die at any time. I agree with you that it is technically flawed, but it may still be viable in the end. At least their existence is not dependent on the mercy of some fools who don't get it, they just sell cars to stay alive. That's one of the major problems of today's version of capitalism -- it encourages technically flawed ways to achieve scientific advancement.
    • yawaworht1978 5y ago
      Would be interesting to know how many buy based on the fsd hype(including the ones who don't pay for the package) and how many buy because of the "green" factor. However many there are who buy because of the fsd promise, all that revenue is coming from vaporware (beta ware at best) and is possible due to lack of regulatory enforcement. History shows that the longer the self regulatory entities take the p, the harder the regulatory hammer comes down eventually.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • supperburg 5y ago
    Lex Fridman said they studied this and found that people don’t become “lulled” even after using the system for a long period of time.
  • slg 5y ago
    One problem that is often ignored in these debates is that people already don't always pay attention while driving. Spend some time looking at other drivers next time you are a passenger in slow traffic. The number of drivers on their phones, eating, doing makeup, shaving, or even reading a book is scary. It therefore isn't a clean swap of a human paying attention to a human who isn't. It becomes a complicated equation that we can't just dismiss with "people won't pay attention". It is possible that a 90%/10% split of drivers paying attention to not paying attention is more dangerous when they are all driving manually than a 70%/30% split if those drivers are all using self-driving tech to cover for them. Wouldn't you feel safer if the driver behind you who is answering texts was using this incremental self-driving tech rather than driving manually? No one has enough data on the performance of these systems or how the population of drivers use them to say definitively that they are either safer or more dangerous on the whole. But it is definitely something that needs to be investigated and researched.
  • MR4D 5y ago
    A car that beeps when I drift out of lane, or beeps when I go too fast before a curve, or beeps like hell if I cross over the center median would be hugely useful, because a record of every warning would be there, whether correct or not. Conversely, if it didn't warn me right before an accident, then the absence of that warning would be useful too. All of that information should be put back into the model based on crash reporting. Everything else can be ignored. I would argue that the information should be available to all automakers (perhaps using the NHTSA as a conduit), so that each of them have the same safety information, but can still develop their own models. The FAA actually does this already with the FAA Accident and Incident Data Systems [0] and it has worked pretty darn well. [0] - https://www.asias.faa.gov/apex/f?p=100:2:::NO https://www.asias.faa.gov/apex/f?p=100:2:::NO:::
    • oceanghost 5y ago
      The new Toyota RAV4's have this feature-- if you go out of bounds in your lane they beep and the steer5ing wheel gives a bit of resistance. It also reads the speed limit signs and places a reminder in the display. I think it can brake if it detects something in front of it, but I'm not certain.
      • MR4D 5y ago
        Many other cars do as well. My main point (perhaps buried more than it should have been) is that by centralizing accident data along with whether an alert went off (or not), and sharing that with all automobile manufacturers can help this process proceed better. Right now the data is highly fragmented and there is not really a common objective metric by which to make decisions to improve models.
        • oceanghost 5y ago
          I'm sorry, I entirely missed your point. I agree that would be reasonable and desirable :-)
• phoe18 5y ago
  > "The involved subject vehicles were all confirmed to have been engaged in either Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control during the approach to the crashes," No mention of the deceptive marketing name "Full Self Driving" in the article.
  • rvz 5y ago
    Exactly. Some of these cars do not even have 'Driver Monitoring', which means the car doesn't even track if the driver has their eyes on the road at all times, which puts many other drivers at risk. On top of that, FSD is still admittedly Level 2; Not exactly 'Full Self Driving'? And the controls can easily be tricked to think that the driver has their 'hands on the wheel' which is not enough to determine driver attentiveness while FSD is switched on.
  • dmix 5y ago
    I checked the website and they seem to be contextualizing "Full-self driving" with it coming at a future date: > All new Tesla cars have the hardware needed in the future for full self-driving in almost all circumstances. [...] As these self-driving capabilities are introduced, your car will be continuously upgraded through over-the-air software updates. https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/autopilot I also personally would prefer they stuck to 'autopilot' and avoided the word full in 'full self-driving' and otherwise be more specific about what it means. Other car companies typically productize the various features like lane assist, following cruise control, etc rather than bundle it into one. But that definitely makes communicating it more difficult. Tesla probably doesn't want to call it 'limited self-driving' or 'partial self-driving'. Maybe 'computer assisted driving' but that doesn't sound as appealing. I can see the difficulty marketing here. But again not using 'full' as in it's complete and ready-to-go would help.
  • xeromal 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure because FSD is out to a limited number of users at the moment. I think it totals around a 1000.
    • kube-system 5y ago
• dotdi 5y ago
  Unfortunately the article doesn't mention anything about how common it is for human drivers to crash into first responder vehicles during the night. I'm not trying to downplay these cases, as hitting emergency vehicles is very bad indeed, yet ~4 such crashes per year might be in the same ballpark or even better than "unassisted" drivers that cause such crashes.
  • toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Also doesn’t mention that this is an inherent limitation in TACC+ systems, and is specifically called out as such in Volvo, BMW, and Cadillac vehicle manuals as a limitation. Much ado about nothing unless regulators are going to outlaw radar based adaptive cruise control (which, of course, they’re not).
  • salawat 5y ago
    frankly, it's hard to even crash into an emerfency in my opinion while actually driving snd paying attention given tgeir lights have gotten so darn bright it's damn near blinding. frankly, I have to slow to a crawl not out of rubbernecking fascination, butout of self preservation to adapt to the dang lighting searing my retinas at night. now running into unlit emergency vehicles? still think tgat's rather difficult sans inebriation or sleep dep.
    • lacksconfidence 5y ago
      the lights are actually what cause the crash. Some drivers just drive straight into the lights. This is part of why police, at least around here, have particular protocols around how far they stop behind a car, and never standing between the cop car and the car they stopped.
  • josefx 5y ago
    Might be around 98 a year if this[1] is the correct list. Edit: I think the page count at the bottom of that list is off, it seems to repeat the last page so it might be less. [1]https://www.respondersafety.com/news/struck-by-incidents/?date=2020&state=All&organization-type=All https://www.respondersafety.com/news/struck-by-incidents/?da...
• mshumi 5y ago
  Judging by the lack of a market reaction this morning, this is mostly immaterial.
  • phpnode 5y ago
    Stocks like Tesla have long been divorced from business realities so I wouldn't put too much stake in that
    • smallhands 5y ago
      time to short Tesla stocks!
      • phpnode 5y ago
        Markets and irrationality and solvency quote goes here
        • rvz 5y ago
          Well I did give a NKLA short 17 days ago and well I ended up laughing all the way to the bank. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996773
          • phpnode 5y ago
            Fortune favours the brave, occasionally!
  • bathtub365 5y ago
    The NASDAQ wasn’t open at the time of your comment, so how can you even make that determination? TSLA is down almost 2% in pre-market trading at the time of this comment, though.
  • catillac 5y ago
    I don’t know much about trading, but it appears to be down nearly 5% this morning as of right now. Regardless, I think you’re conflating trading price with whether something is material in general.
• darkerside 5y ago
  Long overdue. We're going to need a more rapid and iterative way to do this if we got to have even a chance of autopilot type technologies succeeding over the long run. Companies and regulators need to be collecting feedback and pushing for improvement on a regular basis. I still don't think it's likely to succeed, but if it did, this would be the way.
• crubier 5y ago
  Predictable outcome of a sensing system fully based on deep learning. Rare unusual situations don't have enough training data and lead to unpredictable output. I still think that Tesla's approach is the right one, I just think they need to gather more data before letting this product be used in the wild unsupervised.
  • judge2020 5y ago
    Current TACC/auto-steer doesn’t use deep learning except on the newest Model 3/Y vehicles with “TeslaVision”. All cars with radar use the radar and radar only to determine if they should stop for the following car.
    • dawnerd 5y ago
      Definitely use cameras as well to determine stopping. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been the issue with bridges or shadows causing phantom braking.
    • laichzeit0 5y ago
      How does TeslaVision work with stationary objects at night? Like say a big ass truck with its lights off? Do you just pray the vision system recognizes “something” is there? I know they want to pursue a pure-vision system with no radar input, but it seems like there will be some crazy low light / low visibility edge cases you’d have to deal with.
      • marvin 5y ago
        How does a human detect a big ass truck with its lights off at night? This is solvable with computer vision. Tesla's dataset is almost nothing but edge cases, and they keep adding more all the time. My money says they'll get there.
        • laichzeit0 5y ago
          The thing is we don’t. Many people die from rear ending broke down trucks. I’m fine with that, I’m not so sure if regulators will be fine with a TSLA killing someone and going “welp, a human wouldn’t have seen it either, let’s just add this to our edge case dataset”.
• MonadIsPronad 5y ago
  Oopsie. This strikes me as perhaps one of the growing pains of not-quite-self-driving: common sense would dictate that manual control would be taken by the driver when approaching an unusual situation like a roadside incident, but we just can't trust the common sense of a minority of people. Tesla perhaps isn't being loud enough about how autopilot isn't self-driving, and shouldn't even be relied upon to hit the brakes when something is in front of you.
  • ghaff 5y ago
    What on earth makes you think it's the minority of people who stop paying attention when machinery is handling some task all by itself the vast majority of the time? There's plenty of research that says otherwise even among highly-trained individuals.
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  I remember when Google was first presenting on driverless technology about 10 years ago, and they mentioned how you have to go right to full self driving, because any advanced driver assistance will clash with human risk compensation behavior. Risk compensation is fascinating; driving with a bike helmet causes the biker and drivers around the biker to behave more dangerously. Is society sophisticated enough to deal with advanced driver assistance? Is it possible to gather enough data to create self driving ML systems?
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    Risk compensation probably also works the other way, looking forward to all news cars standard supplied with a new safety device that cuts traffic accidents to a small fraction of what they used to be, the only ones remaining are all fatal for the driver. A nice and very sharp 8" stainless steel spike on the steering wheel facing the driver.
    • toast0 5y ago
      > A nice and very sharp 8" stainless steel spike on the steering wheel facing the driver. Didn't we have those in the 50s and 60s? Maybe not sharp, but collapsable steering columns are a significant improvement to survivability.
  • WA 5y ago
    > Risk compensation is fascinating; driving with a bike helmet causes the biker and drivers around the biker to behave more dangerously. Do you have a truly reliable source for that? Because I hear this statement once in a while, and it feels flawed. A helmet protects you from severe head injury if you are in an accident. There are more reasons for accidents than reckless car drivers. For example: - Bad weather - Driver not seeing the biker at all (no matter with or without helmet) - Crash between 2 cyclists
    • xsmasher 5y ago
      Parent did not say that helmets make you less safe. They said that helmets make drivers around the biker behave more dangerously. https://www.bicycling.com/news/a25358099/drivers-give-helmet-cyclists-less-room/ https://www.bicycling.com/news/a25358099/drivers-give-helmet...
• sidibe 5y ago
  Glad the regulators are looking into this. It bothers me that now Tesla seems to have no liability at all for the system not working, since it's always the driver's fault for not paying enough attention. As Teslas get better at driving the drivers will be paying less attention inevitably, Tesla needs to start being responsible at some point
  • bob33212 5y ago
    Every year young drivers die because they were inexperienced and didn't realize they were going too fast to too slow for a certain situation. Once full self driving is statistically safer than humans how will you not let people use it? It is like saying you would rather have 10 children die because of bad driving skills rather than 1 child die because they were not paying attention at all times.
    • sidibe 5y ago
      >Once full self driving is statistically safer than humans how will you not let people use it? I'm fine with self-driving if/when it works (though I'm pretty sure from watching FSD Beta videos shot and edited by their biggest fans with a few interventions every 5 minutes, this is many many many years away for Tesla). But the company selling the self driving has to be responsible to some degree for the mistakes it makes.
      • WA 5y ago
        And responsible for the marketing it puts out: https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware-neighborhood-long?redirect=no https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware... "… HE IS NOT DOING ANYTHING. THE CAR IS DRIVING ITSELF." Online since 2016, debunked as a lie. Still on Tesla’s website.
    • jazzyjackson 5y ago
      As far as that goes if we want to save lives we can just regulate that semi-autonomous cars have to enforce the speed limit + 0 visibility from fog and heavy rain is an automatic pull over and wait for conditions to improve.
• tyingq 5y ago
  The crash in the city of Woodlands, Texas, was pretty terrifying. After hitting a tree, the car caught on fire. The driver was found in the back seat, presumably because he couldn't figure out how to open the door to get out.
  • bishoprook2 5y ago
    I just read about that after your post. Even with the typical lawyer hyperbole it's pretty bad. It seems to me that Tesla door handles (in a world where they've been designing door latches for some time) are just plain ridiculous and likely unreliable but are a side effect of the market the company has been selling into. Gadgets go a long way with Tesla owners. Obviously, things like a latch should not only work under all conditions including no-power, but they should probably be the same under all conditions. 'Emergency' latches aren't going to be used during an emergency as muscle memory is too important.
  • Meekro 5y ago
    Interesting! When HN discussed that story a few months ago[1], the common notion was that the driver had enabled autopilot and climbed into the back seat. Your take seems a lot more plausible. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26869962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26869962
    • tyingq 5y ago
      That discussion was because the local sheriff's office said that there was nobody in the drivers seat at the time of impact. No idea why they would have said that. Tesla says the steering wheel was deformed in a manner consistent with a person being in the driver's seat when it crashed.
• TacticalCoder 5y ago
  I drive a lot across Europe: as in, really a lot, long trip across several countries, several times a year. I drive enough on the highways to know a few scary situations, like the truck driver in a big curve slightly deviating out of his lane and "pushing" me dangerously close to the median strip for example. To me driving requires paying constant attention to the road and being always ready to act swiftly: I just don't understand how you can have a "self driving car but you must but be ready to put your hands back on the steering wheel and your foot on the pedal(s)". I have nothing against many "recent" safety features, like the steering wheel shaking a bit if the car detects you're getting out of your lane without having activated your blinker. Or the car beginning to brake if it detects an obstacle. Or the car giving you a warning if there's a risk when you change lane, etc. But how can you react promptly if you're not ready? I just don't get this. Unless it's a fully self-driving car, without even a steering wheel, a car should help you focus more, not less.
  • KronisLV 5y ago
    > But how can you react promptly if you're not ready? I just don't get this. You cannot, that's the simple truth. You're supposed to focus on the road anyways and should be able to take over once any sort of autopilot or assist system starts working erroneously, yet in practice many people simply assume that those systems being there in the first place mean that you can simply stop focusing on the road altogether. It feels like the claim of "fully self driving vehicle" is at odds with actual safety, or at least will remain so until the technology actually progresses far enough to be on average safer than human drivers, moral issues aside. Whether that will take 15, 50 or 500 years, i cannot say, however. That said, currently such functionality could be good enough for the driver to take a sip from a drink, or fiddle around with a message on their phone, or even mess around on the navigation system or the radio - things that would get done regardless because people are irresponsible, but making which a little bit safer is feasible.
    • ghaff 5y ago
      It's nothing (well certainly not everything) to do with people's assumptions. There's a ton of research around how people simply stop paying attention when there's no reason for them to pay attention 99% of the time. It doesn't even need to be about them pulling out a book or watching a movie. It can simply be zoning out. Maybe, as you say, it's feasible today or soon to better handle brief distractions but once you allow that it's probably dangerous to assume that people won't stretch out those distractions.
• rvz 5y ago
  Did I not just say this before? [0] [1] [2], seems like the safety probe formally agrees with my (and many other's) concerns over the deceptive advertising of the FSD package and its safety risks towards other drivers. Perhaps this is for the best. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996321 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27863941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27863941 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28053883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28053883
  • nickik 5y ago
    That is literally not what this is about.
• t0rt01se 5y ago
  About time some adults got involved.
• antattack 5y ago
  NHTSA is lumping TACC with Autopilot to increase number of incidents and make the case sound more serious: "The involved subject vehicles were all confirmed to have been engaged in either Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control during the approach to the crashes," NHTSA said in a document opening the investigation. TACC is very different from Autopilot.
  • jdavis703 5y ago
    NHTSA reports are usually very neutral. I’d be very surprised if they were out to get Tesla, or really any other corporation or individual.
    • antattack 5y ago
      Every car with adaptive cruise has similar disclaimer, pointing how unreliable system is recognizing parked vehicles [1]: Safety Consideration When Using Adaptive Cruise Control • The system can only brake so much. Your complete attention is always required while driving. • Adaptive Cruise Control does not steer your vehicle. You must always be in control of vehicle steering. • The system may not react to parked, stopped or slow-moving vehicles. You should always be ready to take action and apply the brakes. [1]https://my.gmc.com/how-to-support/driving-performance/driving/adaptive-cruise-control https://my.gmc.com/how-to-support/driving-performance/drivin...
• tmountain 5y ago
  > In one of the cases, a doctor was watching a movie on a phone when his vehicle rammed into a state trooper in North Carolina. Doesn't autopilot require you to put your hands on the wheel fairly regularly? Are these incidents just a matter of people using this feature outside of its intended use case?
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • Ajedi32 5y ago
    One hand on his phone one hand on the wheel, I assume. Newer versions of Autopilot watch to make sure you keep your eyes on the road, probably to prevent this very scenario[1]. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/27/22457430/tesla-in-car-camera-driver-monitoring-system https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/27/22457430/tesla-in-car-cam...
• fallingknife 5y ago
  I always see anecdotes about Tesla crashes, but not any statistics vs other cars. I tend to assume that this is because they aren't more dangerous.
  • catillac 5y ago
    My thought would be that we hear lots of anecdotes because they claim a full self driving capability, so it’s particularly interesting when they crash and are using these assist features. Indeed when I bought my Model Y I paid extra for that capability. Here’s more detail: https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot
• tacobelllover99 5y ago
  Man Tesla are the wrose. Causing more crashes and more likely to catch on fire! Oh wait NM that's tradional ICE cars. FUD is dangerous
• kelvin0 5y ago
  Having human drivers and assisted drivers on the same road is problematic currently. I think the best situation would be to have 'automated' stretches of highway specially designed to 'help' self driving systems. Only self driving vehicles would be allowed on such special highways, and everything would be built around such systems.
  • ghaff 5y ago
    Who is going to pay for these dedicated stretches of highway that only, presumably, relatively wealthy owners of self-driving cars are going to be allowed to use?
    • kelvin0 5y ago
      Any entity (individuals or corporate) could use it of course. Rich or not, since Electric vehicles such as buses could be a public form of transportation on these specially adapted roads.
  • SCNP 5y ago
    Let me preface by saying that I hold no strong opinions on this matter and my comments are purely speculative. This is kind of a position I've held for a long time but a different aspect of the problem. I think a system similar to IFF in aircraft would solve all of these issue. If every car knew where every other car was at all times, you could easily devise a system that would be nearly flawless. The issue is, there is no incremental path to this solution. You would essentially have to start over with the existing transportation network.
    • mattnewton 5y ago
      The problem is that you don’t just need to know about every other vehicle, you still need all the perceptual stuff for pedestrians, bikers, baby carriages, trash, road closures, traffic cops in the middle of the road, etc. All those things are arguably harder to detect reliably than a somewhat standard sized box of metal with pairs of lights in the front and back. I think shooting for superhuman perception of all these things is still where Tesla is failing.
• leroman 5y ago
  Seeing all the near-misses and life saving interventions on YouTube involving Tesla vehicles, 1 death seems not such a bad result.. The question should be - how many lives were saved by this system vs how many would die if driven "normally"?
  • young_unixer 5y ago
    I don't think that should be the question. For example: it's not morally equivalent to die while drunk driving at 150 km/h vs dying as a pedestrian because someone ran over you. I would prefer 10 drunk drivers die instead of just one innocent person.
    • leroman 5y ago
      There's a place for a discussion about the moral repercussions, I doubt it's a 10 drunk driver vs 1 soccer mom situation ;)
    • nickik 5y ago
      The only person who died fell asleep in the car and would have died in any car as far as I remember.
  • thereisnospork 5y ago
    >The question should be - how many lives were saved by this system vs how many would die if driven "normally"? It is also necessary to project this into the future, i.e. looking at the integral of expected lives lost 'rushing' self driving cars vs. 'waiting-and-seeing' (as Americans die at a rate of 40,000 per annum). If twice as many people die for a fixed number of years to create a self driving system that results in half the fatality rate of the status quo, that becomes worth it very, very quickly.
• nikkinana 5y ago
  Shake 'em down, shut that shit down. Non union fuckers.
• thoughtstheseus 5y ago
  Ban human driving on the interstate, highways, etc. Boom, self driving now works at scale.
• okareaman 5y ago
  When I was learning to drive, my grandmother drilled into me to never swerve for an animal that jumps out in front of the car. This saved me when I was driving by the Grand Canyon and jack rabbits kept jumping, out of nowhere seemingly, in front of my car. I drilled "never swerve" into my son and it saved him on a mountain road when he hit a deer. He didn't go into the trees. When I drove in Alaska I asked why the forest was cut back from the road. They said that moose like to step out in front of cars. I have no idea how self-driving fits into this. I don't have a feel how self-driving responds to emergencies. I'd have to experience an emergency in one. For that reason, I don't see myself ever trusting self-driving.
  • lawn 5y ago
    It's always contextual. If you run into a moose head on, you're in for a very bad time.
    • rad_gruchalski 5y ago
      That's where the other three rules apply: 1. always pay full attention to where you are because there might be a truck or a family of 5 coming from the opposite direction, 2. never lift, 3. always look in the direction you want to travel in, not in the direction you currently travel
  • kwhitefoot 5y ago
    When my wife learned to drive in Norway she was instructed never to swerve to avoid a collision regardless of whether it was an elk, a dog or a human being in front of the car, just to stamp hard on the brake. The rationale being that swerving most likely puts more people at risk more of the time. Especially true here where leaving the road often means either colliding with the granite cliff wall or ending up in the fjord or lake.
• myko 5y ago
  I don't know how Tesla ever presumes to achieve FSD when they cannot detect stopped objects in the road, especially emergency vehicles. This is incredibly disappointing. Does anyone know if the FSD Beta has this ability?
  • _ph_ 5y ago
    All these crashes happened with the radar-controlled auto pilot. A radar system basically cannot detect static obstactles, as it doesn't have the spacial resolution to distinguish an obstacle in your lane from something right beside or above it (bridges). They can only use the radar to follow other cars, because these are not stationary objects. Recently, Tesla switched from radar-based to pure optical obstacle recognition. This should vastly improve this kind of behavior. Ironically that the investigation starts at a moment when they basically got rid of the old system. Look on youtube for videos of the FSD beta. It is amazingly good at recognizing the surroundings of a car, including parked vehicles at the road side.
  • kwhitefoot 5y ago
    > cannot detect stopped objects in the road, Neither can Volvo or VW. Actually my 2015 Ap1.5 Model S does detect stopped vehicles, unfortunately not reliably.
• literallyaduck 5y ago
  I believe we should have safety probes. Lots of people who have taken money from the auto industry want this specifically for Tesla. There is a strong possibility this is political punishment for wrongthink.
• guerby 5y ago
  There is about 36000 death on the road per year in the USA for 280 millions vehicles, that's 128.5 death/million vehicule/year If we assume the number of tesla autopilot death double this year to 8 (from 4 at the time of probe launch), for about 900 thousand tesla on the road in USA, that's 8.9 autopilot death/million tesla/year. Ratio between the numbers of 14.4. Tesla reporting says for Q1 2021 one crash on autopilot per 4.19 millions miles vs one crash per 484 thousand miles all vehicules. Ratio between the numbers of 8.7 All numbers are full of biases and their ratio probably aren't that meaningful but they end up in the same magnitude. Interesting data there "Fatality Facts 2019 Urban/rural comparison": https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/urban-rural-comparison https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/urban... "Although 19 percent of people in the U.S. live in rural areas and 30 percent of the vehicle miles traveled occur in rural areas, almost half of crash deaths occur there. " I was shocked that in the USA in 2019 about 40-46% of all road death people were unbelted, while 90% of front seat people wear seat belts according to observation studies. Incidentally tesla car will beep to no end if weight is detected on a seat and seat belt isn't clicked: I have to click the seat belt when I put my (not so heavy) bag on the passenger seat since there's no software option to disable the beeping.
  • darkwizard42 5y ago
    Two notes: 1. generally speaking the right way to think about accidents/fatalities/hard breaking events is per miles driven given that risk scales with time spent on road (and miles driven is the best proxy we have at the moment, insurance companies use this stat) 2. If wearing a seat belt prevents a ton of fatalities as advertised and generally proven, it would make sense that of the road fatalities that do happen, many are due to not wearing a seat belt. 10% of people not wearing seat belts is still hundreds of millions of miles driven without seat belts.
  • jazzyjackson 5y ago
    My issue with comparing these statistics is that on the highway I see no shortage of reckless driving: speeding 20 over, weaving traffic, etc. Subtract this population (maybe by taking away their license and building public transit for them) and what do the numbers look like? Your seat belt stat supports this, a lot of drivers aren’t even trying not to die. Of course, highway driving is the least dangerous (per passenger mile) since everything is so predictable, I don’t know how many deaths are caused by t-bones at intersections but that at least should disappear now that auto-radar brakes are a thing… (tesla thinks it’s too good for radar of course, even tho it can’t recognize a god damn fire truck is in the way)
• gamblor956 5y ago
  Craziest statistic: of the 31 serious crashes involving driver-assist systems in the U.S. since June 2016, 25 of them involved Tesla Autopilot.
  • blueplanet200 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
    • gamblor956 5y ago
      It does not matter how you dice up the statistics. Of the millions of cars with driver assist, Tesla's make up the majority of serious accidents, and the majority of accidents of vehicles crashing into emergency vehicles on the road. On an absolute basis, relative basis, per capita basis, etc., Tesla Autopilot has more, serious crashes than all other driver assist systems. (And note that this does not include any FSD-related accidents.) This is an issue because Tesla markets its cars as being "safer" than other company's vehicles, and the data shows that their driver assist system is objectively not.
• joewadcan 5y ago
  This will end up being a very good thing for Tesla. They were able to operate semi-autonomous vehicles for years while they iterated through software versions. They are faaar from done, but a likely outcome will be more stringent regulation on companies that want to do a similar approach of putting the betas in customers hands. This makes it way harder for automotive companies to get the same leeway, putting Tesla further ahead.
  • jazzyjackson 5y ago
    This is good for Bitcoin
• supperburg 5y ago
  The Tesla FSD beta is what we all dreamed of in the 90s. It’s mind blowing. Its so crazy that it’s finally arrived, though not able to fully and reliably drive itself in every circumstance, and nobody seems to care. People only seem to be foaming at the mouth about the way way the product is labeled. If HN found the holy grail but it was labeled “un-holy grail” then HN would apparently chuck it over their shoulder.
  • deleted 5y ago
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• jedberg 5y ago
  A lot of people in here saying it is not possible to drive safely with partial self driving. I wonder, how many of those people have actually driven a car with autopilot? I have autopilot on my car, and it definitely makes me a better and safer driver. It maintains my distance from the car in front and my speed while keeping me in my lane, so my brain no longer has to worry about those mundane things. Instead I can spend all my brainpower focused on looking for potential emergencies, instead of splitting time between lane keeping/following and looking for emergencies. I no longer have to look at my speedometer or the lane markers, I can take a much broader view of the traffic and conditions around me. Before you say it's impossible to be safe driving with an assistive product, I suggest trying one out.
  • int_19h 5y ago
    I have a car that does those things as well, and I use it a lot... but it's not Tesla, and its manufacturer doesn't refer to it "autopilot" or "self driving", but rather "advanced cruise control".
  • throwaway09223 5y ago
    Agreed. I have a rudimentary radar enhanced cruise control in my minivan and I've found it's really helpful for maintaining a safe stopping distance while driving.
  • tomdell 5y ago
    I would argue that partial self driving is an irresponsible product not because it's impossible to drive safely with it, but because so many people will use it as an excuse to pay little to no attention to the road. If you personally are a responsible driver and even a better driver with it, that's great - but most people probably aren't going to use it the same way, especially those without much of an understanding of the technology - and especially given the way that Tesla markets it.
    • jskrn 5y ago
      Well said, that last bit especially. The regulations on medical devices are on how the manufacturer markets it. Should be the same for driving technology.
• zugi 5y ago
  Teslas are the safest vehicles on the road, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. (https://drivemag.com/news/how-safe-are-tesla-cars-5-facts-and-myths-explained https://drivemag.com/news/how-safe-are-tesla-cars-5-facts-an...). Teslas crash 40% less than other cars, and 1/3 the number of people are killed in Teslas versus other cars. Indeed once a common failure mode like this is identified it needs to be investigated and fixed. Something similar happened a few years ago when someone driving a Tesla while watching a movie (not paying attention) died when they crashed into a light-colored tractor trailer directly crossing the road. So an investigation makes sense. But much of the general criticism of self-driving and autopilot here seems misplaced. Teslas and other self-driving vehicle technologies are saving lives. They will continue to save lives compared to human drivers, as long as we let them.
  • derbOac 5y ago
    I really wrestle with this line of reasoning. Tesla keeps pointing this out, and it's appealing to me, but at the same time something about it seems off to me. I can't tell if this is erroneous intuition on my part blinding me to a more rational assessment, or if that intuition is onto something important. Some top-of-my-head thoughts: 1. I think to make a fair comparison of Tesla versus other cars, you'd have to really ask "how much safer are Tesla owners in Teslas compared to other cars randomly assigned to them?" That is, comparing the accident rates of Teslas compared to other cars is misleading because Tesla owners are not a random slice of the population. I almost guarantee that if you e.g., looked at their accident rates prior to owning a Tesla their accident rates would be lower than the general population. 2. In these autopilot situations, bringing up general accident rates seems sort of like a red herring to me. The actual causally relevant issue is "what would happen in this scenario if someone were driving without an autopilot?" So, for example, in the example of the rider who was killed when the autopilot drove them into a semi, the actually relevant question is "what would have happened if that driver, or someone interchangeable with them, was driving without autopilot? Would have they drove themselves into a semi?" 3. Various experts have argued general vehicle accident rates aren't comparable to Teslas because average cars are much, much older. As such, you should be comparing accident rates of cars of the same age, if nothing else. So, aside from the driver effect pointed out earlier, you have the question of "what would the accident rate look like in a Tesla or a car identical to it without autopilot?" 4. At some point with autopilot -- whether it be Tesla or other companies -- you have to start treating it comparably to a single individual. So, for example, what are the odds of Person A27K38, driving the same number of miles as Tesla, having a certain pattern of accidents? If you found a specific person drove into first responders on the side of the road 11 times, wouldn't that be suggestive of a pattern? Or would it? It's not enough to ask "how often do non autopilot drivers drive into first responders on the side of the road", it seems to me important to ask "how often would a single driver drive into first responders on the side of the road, given a certain number of miles driven in that same period?" At some point, autopilot becomes a driver, in the sense it has a unique identity regardless of how many copies of it there are? Maybe that's not right but it seems like that is the case.
• kemiller 5y ago
  OK people. There have been a grand total of 11 cases in 2.5 years. NHTSA investigates a lots of things. How many regular drivers collided with emergency vehicles in the same time frame?
  • jdavis703 5y ago
    The FBI has stats on police deaths by type of death. If memory serves correctly slightly more cops were killed in traffic crashes than that. However, I’m assuming the crashes were quite varied: anything from a driver recklessly fleeing a stop to some drunk crashing into a cop on the highway shoulder. Most likely these deaths didn’t have a systematic pattern to them that could be prevented if only we knew what the root cause was.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• Animats 5y ago
  Right. As I've pointed out previously, Tesla seems to be unable to detect sizable stationary obstacles that are partly blocking a lane, especially if they don't look like the rear end of a car. In addition to emergency vehicles, Teslas on autopilot have plowed into freeway barriers and a street sweeper. That's the usual situation for first responders, who usually try to block as little of the road as possible but often don't have enough shoulder space. It's clear what Tesla really has - a good lane follower and cruise control that slows down for cars ahead. That's a level 2 system. That's useful, but, despite all the hype about "full self driving", it seems that's all they've got. "Full self driving" just adds some lane-changing assistance and hints from the nav system.
  • qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
    Yeah, let's ignore all the good and force everyone to go back to human drivers that are 10x worse.
    • clifdweller 5y ago
      the point isn't to ignore it but to make sure everyone using it is 100% aware they need to be paying attention as this is a edge case that is common that the system cant handle so drivers are still responsible to take over
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      Can you please stop repeating this tripe, it's been debunked over-and-over again, and it is really getting tiring.
    • evanextreme 5y ago
      No one is saying this should be the case, just that the feature is not what the company advertises (the ability for the car to fully drive itself) and that said feature is further away from completion than many might lead you to believe. as someone who drives a tesla with autopilot, I agree with this. Autopilot is the best lane assistance system ive used, but thats all it is.
    • breakfastduck 5y ago
• zebnyc 5y ago
  I was excited to read about Tesla's "autopilot" until I read the details. To me as a consumer, autopilot would let me get in my car after dinner in SF, set the destination as Las Vegas and wake up in the morning at Vegas. Wake me up when that exists. Or I can tell my car, "Hey tesla, go pickup my kid from soccer practice" and it would know what to do.
• kube-system 5y ago
  There are a lot of good points here in the comments already about the relative safety of Tesla's system compared to other vehicles and other automated driving system -- and I think they're probably right. The differentiating issue with Tesla's system is the way it is sold and marketed. Important operational safety information shouldn't be hidden in fine print. Subtly misleading marketing has unfortunately become acceptable in our culture, but this idea needs to stay out of safety-critical systems. We need a mandate for clear and standardized labelling for these features, à la the Monroney sticker. All manufacturers should have to label and market their cars with something like SAE J3016. https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/gallery/cm/articles/press-releases/2018/12/j3016-levels-of-automation-image.png https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/gallery/cm/articles/pre...
• hetspookjee 5y ago
  I wonder how many accidents happened because people were fiddling with their screen to turn on the windscreen wipers and took their eyes of the road too long in poor sight. I can't believe the law allowed the controls for the wiper speed to be put into this capacitive screen.
• yawaworht1978 5y ago
  I remember that video "driver is only there because of regulatory rules". That is a flat out lie, safe to say so by now. The autopilot accidents per distance is also cherry picked, turn on autopilot everywhere , including bad weather and see how that comparison goes. And the claim that the cars have all the hardware for future fsd is quite out there too. It's a bit like saying I have the next Michael Phelps here, he just cannot swim yet.
• sunshineforever 5y ago
  I wonder, how does the autopilot safety record compare to driving in similar conditions to those which AP is typically used (open highway, good weather).
• njarboe 5y ago
  Anybody have more information about how many, if any, of these wrecks happened after Tesla moved to vision only Autopilot? Maybe this obvious problem has already been mostly fixed with the new system and possibly a main reason for going to full vision in the first place. It seems to me NHTSA need to move a little faster with this quickly changing technology as they are going back to examine crashes that happened starting from Jan, 2018 with this probe.
• killjoywashere 5y ago
  TeslaDeaths.com estimates Tesla at ~240M miles per death as of late 2019 (1). NHTSA puts the national rat for all vehicles in 2020 at ~90M miles per death. If we exclude motorcycles, the national rate is 104M miles per death in 2020. (1) https://www.tesladeaths.com/miles.html https://www.tesladeaths.com/miles.html (2) https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
• sitkack 5y ago
  Sounds like the system should be shut off completely until they find the flaws.
• geekraver 5y ago
  It would be great if Tesla could actually get speed limit detection right for starters, and then slow down the car in time for a new reduced speed limit. Had my MY for just a few days and found that inability pretty annoying. It detected a 40mph road as 60, and a 60mph freeway (which is only ever 60mph) as 70. I’ve had 5 year old Garmin GPS units that do better than that offline. I mentioned this in a local owner group and a bunch others chimed in saying they see this too.
• LightG 5y ago
  Maybe the AI has become self-aware. It's now picking off it's enemies, slowly, strategically, one by one.