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If only we paid the same attention to human driver accidents. It's good to keep the company and technology accountable but I still believe that autopilot is _mi

If only we paid the same attention to human driver accidents. It's good to keep the company and technology accountable but I still believe that autopilot is _miles_ better than your _average_ driver. Like in this particular case - it was on a bend, there was an oncoming car approaching - should the autopilot have hit the brakes at full and risk swerving into the oncoming car? Should it have swerved around the deer and hit the oncoming car? I would have probably slowed down a bit but still hit it as human reaction speed is not that fast in reality. The deer becomes clearly visible ~3:53 and contact is made at ~3:56. Studies[1] show that the average reaction speed is 1.5 seconds. This leaves 1.5 seconds to come to a full stop. Would you be able to come to a dead stop within that timeframe at 70mph? Every time a Tesla thread comes up I see so many "couch racers" in comments that pretend they're formula 1 drivers with split second reactions. In reality this is a life-saving technology - imagine how much death, loss and suffering will self-driving cars prevent by taking drunk people off the road alone. [1] https://roads-waterways.transport.nsw.gov.au/saferroadsnsw/speeding_and_crashes.pdf https://roads-waterways.transport.nsw.gov.au/saferroadsnsw/s...

leereeves 5y ago
Moving too fast to react isn't an excuse for a human driver; that's just driving too fast. Applying the same standard to Autopilot, if the Tesla was going so fast that it didn't have time to stop for an obstacle as far away as that deer was at 3:53, it was going too fast. But she says the Tesla didn't brake at all, which suggests it just didn't recognize the deer or doesn't have a rule saying that an animal walking toward the road might be dangerous.
- temikus 5y ago
  That’s not how this works - cars go at a speed limit set by the road they’re on. The speed limit is selected based on safety factors present on the road. By your logic, one needs to move 30mph on the interstate to make sure they can react to whatever jumps out at them. Or am I misunderstanding something here?
  - leereeves 5y ago
    I'm not talking about situations where something jumps out of nowhere or a meteor falls out of the sky onto the road. This deer didn't jump out onto the road. It slowly walked out onto the road; it was visible near the edge of the car's vision; and it was easy to anticipate that it might walk in front of the car. I've encountered many situations like this without hitting the animal. I would slow down and move aside to give the deer room, starting as soon as I saw the deer at 3:53. If the deer had moved faster and taken the whole lane I'd have passed it in the other lane. The oncoming car wasn't that close. But you must also be able to stop in this distance, because the obstacle might not be a deer you can steer around, it might be a fallen tree that blocks the whole road. You're certainly right that many human drivers would not do better than the Tesla here, but we should expect the Tesla to be better than a bad human driver.
    - mkr-hn 5y ago
      It's interesting to watch the continued narrative shift away from the original sales pitch of self-driving as a solution to human fallibility even at low autonomy levels to stuff like "you wouldn't expect a human to do better in the same situation." It's like that scene in The Simpsons with Homer chasing the grill as the pig atop it connects with increasingly nasty things as he yells "it's still good!"
  - timerol 5y ago
    Speed limits are a maximum, not a minimum. With limited visibility in fog or snow, it is extremely common to see cars going 10+ mph under the speed limit. The speed limit is supposed to be the maximum appropriate speed in ideal conditions. In practice almost no one treats it that way, but that's the philosophy by which it was designed. They take into account the clear area on the side of the road, sight lines, and the curve of the road itself.

leereeves 5y ago

Moving too fast to react isn't an excuse for a human driver; that's just driving too fast. Applying the same standard to Autopilot, if the Tesla was going so fast that it didn't have time to stop for an obstacle as far away as that deer was at 3:53, it was going too fast. But she says the Tesla didn't brake at all, which suggests it just didn't recognize the deer or doesn't have a rule saying that an animal walking toward the road might be dangerous.

temikus 5y ago
That’s not how this works - cars go at a speed limit set by the road they’re on. The speed limit is selected based on safety factors present on the road. By your logic, one needs to move 30mph on the interstate to make sure they can react to whatever jumps out at them. Or am I misunderstanding something here?
- leereeves 5y ago
  I'm not talking about situations where something jumps out of nowhere or a meteor falls out of the sky onto the road. This deer didn't jump out onto the road. It slowly walked out onto the road; it was visible near the edge of the car's vision; and it was easy to anticipate that it might walk in front of the car. I've encountered many situations like this without hitting the animal. I would slow down and move aside to give the deer room, starting as soon as I saw the deer at 3:53. If the deer had moved faster and taken the whole lane I'd have passed it in the other lane. The oncoming car wasn't that close. But you must also be able to stop in this distance, because the obstacle might not be a deer you can steer around, it might be a fallen tree that blocks the whole road. You're certainly right that many human drivers would not do better than the Tesla here, but we should expect the Tesla to be better than a bad human driver.
  - mkr-hn 5y ago
    It's interesting to watch the continued narrative shift away from the original sales pitch of self-driving as a solution to human fallibility even at low autonomy levels to stuff like "you wouldn't expect a human to do better in the same situation." It's like that scene in The Simpsons with Homer chasing the grill as the pig atop it connects with increasingly nasty things as he yells "it's still good!"
- timerol 5y ago
  Speed limits are a maximum, not a minimum. With limited visibility in fog or snow, it is extremely common to see cars going 10+ mph under the speed limit. The speed limit is supposed to be the maximum appropriate speed in ideal conditions. In practice almost no one treats it that way, but that's the philosophy by which it was designed. They take into account the clear area on the side of the road, sight lines, and the curve of the road itself.