26 ms·

Tell HN: Tesla rear-ended me on autopilot, no one will investigate

• ensignavenger 5y ago
  Did the local police not come out and investigate?
  • raylad 5y ago
    Yes, they were there and so was a fire engine. I don't think it's typical for police to request autopilot logs from Tesla though.
    • BitwiseFool 5y ago
      I'm not defending the police per-se, but I assume the local PD probably doesn't know how to handle such an investigation yet.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
• xyzzy21 5y ago
  This is still a local thing. The Feds don't have jurisdiction. You need to either 1) file a police report and an insurance claim, and let things play out, or 2) hire a lawyer. In either case, the Tesla has excellent dash cam video and flight-recorder black box data which can be subpoenaed/demanded. Beyond that, you have no other options. Certainly not the NTSB or NHTSA.
• sleibrock 5y ago
  Do you have any pictures of the accident site? Just for curiosity sake.
  • pdonis 5y ago
    If he does he shouldn't be posting them here. He should be giving them to his insurance company so they can go after the other driver's insurance company for compensation.
    • buffington 5y ago
      I'm confused. Digital images can be posted here AND sent to an insurance company. What am I missing?
      • pdonis 5y ago
        If the images contain information that is relevant to an insurance claim, they probably should not be posted in a public forum that everyone on the Internet can see.
      • xeromal 5y ago
        You could potentially post evidence against yourself if you posted online. It's a little shady but I don't think many people are ok with shooting themselves in the foot.
• sidibe 5y ago
  I have a feeling a lot of stuff is being swept under the rug at this stage. Watching how many near misses are on YouTube from a handful of beta testers, the only accidents I've seen are rims being destroyed by curbing. From the amount of dicy things it's doing I find it hard to believe there's no accidents. Especially before the rollback last week of 10.3 where a lot of people reported very dangerous behavior as soon as it rolled out
  • mtoner23 5y ago
    Wait till you see the amount of car accidents from non autopilot vehicles! you'd want to ban cars all together if a youtube video was posted for every accident.
    • ashtonkem 5y ago
      Come on, that’s blatant whataboutism. Surely we’re good enough here to realize that we can hold both Tesla and other drivers to a higher standard? Yes, people are often bad drivers. But it doesn’t follow that we must ignore the faults of any self driving technology just because regular drivers crash too. If Tesla is pushing out updates that make their own super fans comment on the cars doing unsafe and erratic things, that’s something we should look into.
      • NickM 5y ago
        I don't think that's an example of whataboutism, given that one of the stated goals of autopilot is literally to provide a safer alternative to the status quo of humans driving manually; pointing out the riskiness of driving in general is not some unrelated thing that's being raised as a distraction from the real issue.
      • jjk166 5y ago
        No, we can't. Accidents are going to happen no matter what because driving is a complex task with an infinite number of potential failure modes, and no threshold where the risk of serious injury or death can be considered zero. If something is safer than average, then it is objectively an improvement, and that's all it needs to be.
• jdavis703 5y ago
  If Tesla, NTSB and NHTSA refuse to investigate, you could hire a lawyer who's willing to go after Tesla specifically. I've similarly been stonewalled by Lyft. Long story short, the driver was fiddling with the official Lyft app that sends notifications during revenue service when the driver caused a 3-car pile up. Be careful, a lot car crash lawyers just want an easy pay day by hounding the insurance companies. Make sure your lawyer is on the same page as you.
• throwaway803453 5y ago
  On a motorcycle if I am at a stop with no one behind me I am periodically scanning my review mirror and considering escape routes. If some appears to approach too fast I start flashing my break light until it is clear they are decelerating at a comfortable level. I am going to start taking a similar precaution when driving. I'll just flash of my hazard lights once and hopefully that triggers something in the driver or autopilot.
  • HWR_14 5y ago
    Since Tesla was hitting stationary emergency vehicles, you might put yourself in more danger doing that for a Tesla on Autopilot.
• juanani 5y ago
  This is what regulatory capture looks like. Barricades to get the proper authorities to regulate. But omg buy T$LA
• veltas 5y ago
  Recently I was driving behind a Tesla and it suddenly started braking for no reason at all, I almost rear-ended it. I think it had something to do with the sun reflecting on the road surface brightly because I noticed this reflection just as I was driving past where the car suddenly started braking.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• h2odragon 5y ago
  Anther 10 years and few thousand injured and dead, you may be able to collect enough statistics to interest someone in starting a lawsuit. Look at what it took to get acknowledgement that Pintos had a problem.
• tacobelllover99 5y ago
  Yeah it seems like a serious problem that the driver wasn't paying attention for sure. My money is OP is a short
• AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  If this keeps happening, it seems like a logical consequence would be for Teslas to become more expensive to insure.
  • zarkov99 5y ago
    Nah, if indeed AP on was more dangerous than AP off then Tesla would just shut it down over the wire.
    • klyrs 5y ago
      I'd agree if you say "less profitable" instead of "more dangerous."
      • zarkov99 5y ago
        AP is not profitable at all right now. I am not sure what you mean.
• Dotnaught 5y ago
  Feel free to email me: tclaburn at theregister dot com
  • slownews45 5y ago
    You can see here how "journalism" runs to stuff that's not based on any data. 5 million + car accidents, and a probably total bogus retelling from someone probably not even sure what they were doing (ie, did she read manual?) will make it into a news article.
    • lvs 5y ago
      I don't think you understand what real journalists do. Bad ones might perhaps just "forward" an unchallenged claim as your uncle does on Facebook. Journalists and editors trained at journalism schools have a little more integrity and skepticism than your uncle.
      • hasdf 5y ago
        Ah yes the "no true journalist" argument
        • lvs 5y ago
          Wait, so your contention is that a profession is defined by its worst practitioners? OK, in that case, software developers are all script kiddies.
      • slownews45 5y ago
        Except if you pay attention to any of this you see that they mostly forward unchallenged claims, if they fit a narrative, and do not follow-up, offer no backstory.
    • striking 5y ago
      You're assuming this will instantly be spun into a story based on this one anecdote. It might be used as one anecdote of many, it may be represented as one point of view among many, it may never end up becoming a story at all. "You can see here how" a journalist is choosing to investigate a possibly promising lead while their profession continues to be misunderstood.
• heavyset_go 5y ago
  > The driver said she was using Autopilot, that an OTA update had had a problem earlier in the day, and that she had actually had the same kind of collision on Autopilot previously! So she continued to use it? That's insane. It's worrying that there are tons of videos on YouTube reviewing Tesla's Autopilot and FSD where the cars do something incredibly scary and dangerous, and the drivers just laugh it off, go "well, it's a beta!" and continue using it instead of turning off the feature that almost got them into a car accident. I don't want to share the road with drivers who think dangerous driving is a funny game.
  • penjelly 5y ago
    this is how i feel too. i want FSD to succeed and i dont want it to destroy itself during the beta. But the videos ive seen are how you put it, people say "whoa that was close" and then re-engage autopilot and have 3-4 more incidents in the same session
    • FireBeyond 5y ago
      And then laugh nervously, and demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of ML. "We need to keep having near misses to train the car of what a near miss might be!". And God forbid if they post a dashcam video to YouTube. Then they'll get hit with comments like this with a sincere straight face: > "FSD didn't try to kill you. More like you're trying to get FSD killed by publishing this video."
  • hasdf 5y ago
    > "So she continued to use it? That's insane." Well its proving to be a great excuse when she runs into people with her car. Sounds like a win for her
  • ashtonkem 5y ago
    “It’s a beta” and the unsaid “and I don’t care about other peoples’ lives anyways”. Still pretty frustrated nobody has regulated “self driving” cars off the market yet. If you’re testing it with a driver and a copilot that’s fine, but putting it in the hands of customers and using “it’s a beta” to hide behind should not be legal.
• mwint 5y ago
  Have your insurance company harass Tesla. Chances are they’ll come back with a report saying “driver depressing accelerator 13.42° at time of incident overriding AEB and ignoring FCW for 5 seconds”. That’s usually how these kinds of stories end.
  • pdonis 5y ago
    The OP's insurance company should be asking the other driver's insurance company to cover the loss. Then the other driver's insurance company should be harassing Tesla if it believes Tesla was responsible.
    • mwint 5y ago
      OP’s insurance company can harass Tesla directly if they believe Tesla holds evidence of the true cause of the crash, which they probably do.
      • dragonwriter 5y ago
        But neither is going to go after Tesla, because insurance companies aren't about ferocious prosecution of potentially valid legal claims, or manifesting customer outrage, but getting things resolved in a final manner as quickly as possible with as little out of their pocket as possible. To go after Tesla for defective FSD over any individual accident takes a litigant who is more concerned with making a point and/or harming Tesla than cost effectiveness.
    • soheil 5y ago
      It's probably safe to assume that if she were going to do that she would have done that the first she got into this type of high speed accident.
  • raylad 5y ago
    I doubt they will do anything. They have a process: claims adjuster looks at the police report, looks at the wreckage, proposes a payment, closes the file. Anything else would be extra work on their part and not required or probably even encouraged.
• huslage 5y ago
  She is still the driver. Blaming things on Autopilot is not going to get anyone very far in the legal sense.
  • JshWright 5y ago
    Tesla seems to want it both ways... Sell their cars by marketing how magical the autopilot is, then blaming drivers when the believe the marketing hype.
    • buffington 5y ago
      I only have my own experience to draw upon, so I may be an outlier, but I didn't buy a Tesla because of its Autopilot feature. If they pulled the feature today, I'd be totally fine with that. As a user of Autopilot, it's absolutely insane to me that anyone would blame Autopilot for a wreck. It's like a "smart" cruise control, except unlike cruise control, it gives you all sorts of warnings about your role as the driver and will shut itself off if it thinks you're not paying attention. Any one blaming Autopilot for a Tesla wreck is either trying to sensationalize, or is just completely inept or lying.
      • yupper32 5y ago
        > I didn't buy a Tesla because of its Autopilot feature. If they pulled the feature today, I'd be totally fine with that. Many many people paid $1000+ for the promise of Full Self-Driving that doesn't exist. People definitely care about the Autopilot feature a lot more than you. > It's like a "smart" cruise control Except they call it Autopilot! You can't call something Autopilot and then blame people for expecting the car to drive itself. Call it lane assist or cruise control plus or something.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
    • FireBeyond 5y ago
      Yup. Tesla will happily put out press releases saying "autopilot is not at fault - the vehicle warned the driver prior to the collision to put hands on the steering wheel"... One warning. Fourteen minutes prior to the incident. That part wasn't in the press release. The Summon feature is the same. Marketing copy: "Use Summon in a car park to bring your vehicle to you while dealing with a fussy child" (literal quote). Disclaimer: "Do not use Summon while distracted." There's apparently a giant Chinese wall between Marketing and Legal at Tesla, because it's far from the only example. Another, that's still present in some Tesla videos, and has been there for years: > The driver is only in the seat for legal reasons. The car is driving itself.
• kf6nux 5y ago
  You might be able to seek a criminal complaint (not that I recommend it). You can call your local DA's office to see what they think. It's unlikely they'd want to take on Tesla, but a CA DA might go after the driver for criminal negligence.
  • tacobelllover99 5y ago
    Take on Tesla? The driver is responsible at all times. If AP was failing to stop the driver should have been paying attention and took over.
• kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  Sue Tesla. It's their responsibility for this garbage. You will get all the incriminating data during discovery.
  • trutannus 5y ago
    Sue a billion dollar company? I'm not sure that's a solution for the vast majority of people. Fighting discovery is generally step one in the process of dealing with this sort of lawsuit. Something like this could/will take years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars to deal with. It would be likely cheaper to buy a whole new car every year for five years than to take Tesla to court.
    • bolasanibk 5y ago
      Nit: 1 $[T]rillion as of today.
      • trutannus 5y ago
        Even worse/better!
  • gameswithgo 5y ago
    Or you may find out the driver of the Tesla was lying.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • slownews45 5y ago
    That's not how it works. You sue the driver, if they have insurance the insurance company steps in, after paying you out the insurance company can go after tesla.
    • kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      If that's not how it works we'd still have Pintos and Corvairs on the streets. Companies can be held responsible for defective products no matter how much they want the shift the blame to someone else.
• INTPenis 5y ago
  It's not actually that much different than a negligent driver. The driver was negligent with the OTA update and the driver was negligent enough to trust autopilot in traffic. Tesla should of course improve its autopilot technology but I don't see how they're responsible for the crash.
  • i_am_proteus 5y ago
    A common reason people (me included) fault Tesla is that their marketing is designed to instill more trust in the auto pilot feature than the user ought have given that feature's maturity, while cleverly dancing around the truth to avoid legal liability, which can instead be placed on "negligent drivers."
    • buffington 5y ago
      I own a Tesla, and I'm not a Tesla apologist. There's tons of stuff that is just wrong about that car (the UI for example, is a dumpster fire). That said, I recall hearing some stuff in the early Tesla days about how the cars could drive themselves. Summoning, auto parking, and some hints at what we now know as Full Self Driving. Aside from that, I don't recall much marketing hype around Autopilot. It has a bullet point on the Model 3 website, and some details on the naming of related features and what they do, but that's about it. None of it seems like "hype". Here's the full description of Autopilot: > Autopilot enables your car to steer, accelerate and brake automatically within its lane. That's it. In the car's user manual it makes it very clear what the feature does and what your responsibilities are as a driver. They don't make it out as some sort of magical feature.
      • shmoe 5y ago
        Someone needs to tell this to the idiot at my mother's office that praises autopilot because he can answer all his emails during his commutes.
      • i_am_proteus 5y ago
        Things like Elon Musk (he is the Tesla CEO) making statements about the self-driving capabilities of the vehicle come to mind: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/elon-musk-says-every-new-tesla-can-drive/ https://www.wired.com/2016/10/elon-musk-says-every-new-tesla... You're correct about what's in the fine print. But this Musk fellow is effectively Tesla's salesman in chief, and has quite a following on the Internet.
• revscat 5y ago
  Why do you think she was telling the truth? People’s instincts in such situations are for self-preservation, and shifting blame elsewhere is common.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• belval 5y ago
  I'll go against the general opinion in this thread and say that this is not something that I'd expect to be blamed on Tesla. Especially considering this: > The driver said she was using Autopilot, that an OTA update had had a problem earlier in the day, and that she had actually had the same kind of collision on Autopilot previously! Autopilot might be an absolute dumpster fire, but what you are describing is similar to an adaptive cruise control failure and the liability is still with the driver. She rear ended you while you were at a red light, make sure that her insurance pays and that's it. If she wishes to sue Tesla she can obviously do so.
  • evv 5y ago
    I have adaptive cruise control, and it behaves the exact same today as it did on the day I test drove the car. It doesn't change behavior unpredictably with OTA updates! How was the driver supposed to know that the previous issue was not some rare fluke? Tesla is recklessly rolling out software, and amazingly has pushed off the liability to the drivers willing to try it. Sadly we are all part of the beta, like it or not, if there are are Teslas driving around on public streets. I'm mostly shocked that insurance rates have not skyrocketed for FSD beta testers.
    • belval 5y ago
      To clarify, I was responding to the OP with regard to the "investigation" part. Authorities won't launch an investigation on someone rear-ending someone else on the basis that "autopilot did it". As a wronged individual he should make sure that he is properly compensated as non-responsible for the crash. The driver herself can (and maybe should!) at least contact Tesla to inquire about the whole thing. If truly Teslas with FSD are causing more accidents than another car then yes at some point some government body will investigate but they won't care about a single incident with only material damages.
    • _ea1k 5y ago
      > I have adaptive cruise control, and it behaves the exact same today as it did on the day I test drove the car. It doesn't change behavior unpredictably with OTA updates! I do too on a non-Tesla. I've seen differing behaviors not just due to updates but due to the time of day!
• MBCook 5y ago
  What about done sort of civil suit for negligence? If she knew it was prone to this from her previous incident and let it happen again could that be grounds? I bet some sort of auto accident lawyer would salivate at the idea of suing a trillion dollar company.
  • pdonis 5y ago
    The negligence would be on the part of the other driver, not Tesla.
• spullara 5y ago
  She was probably lying.
• dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Does anyone have any idea about how to get this actually investigated to see if it was another Autopilot failure? If you want to get autopilot in general invesitgated and you think that's not happening enough based on your experience, because the thresholds used by agencies skip investigation when it is warranted, you should direct your complaints to Congress, especially your members and those on the relevant committees. This will probably not, even in the case where it is part of triggering action, get your accident invesitgated differently, but if your concern is general safety that's probably not important. If you really want your accident investigated more thoroughly, you’ll probably have to do it yourself by gathering enough initial evidence to find an attorney willing to pursue it as a defective product liability case against Tesla. This may be complicated somewhat by dealing with the existing insurance companies involved in handling claims out of the accident, but that's probably a small part of the involved challenge. On the other hand, your personal potential financial upside is higher in this case, though the likelihood of recovery may not be good.
• tobyjsullivan 5y ago
  Possible scenario A: Teslas have a fundamental flaw that causes a single driver to have several accidents. Multiplied by the number of Tesla drivers who use Autopilot, there must be hundreds of thousands of unreported and uninvestigated auto-pilot accidents. Most certainly a conspiratorial cover-up by Tesla, the NTSB, and the NHTSA. Possible scenario B: The driver of the Tesla has misrepresented or misunderstood the facts of the situation. Possible scenario C: The driver of the Tesla doesn't know that she should take her foot off the accelerator pedal when using Autopilot. I suppose any of these (or several other) scenarios are at least possible. I'd probably apply Hanlon's razor here before anything else.
  • raylad 5y ago
    One concern I would like investigated is that it appears Tesla's Autopilot can't detect (or can no longer detect?) stationary objects. Until fairly recently, I believe that the RADAR, which used to be in all their cars, would have detected the stationary object (me) and applied braking force to at least reduce the impact. Now, though, Tesla has stopped installing RADARs in their cars and apparently also disabled existing RADAR in cars that have it (because they all are using the same camera-only software). If this has also removed the ability to detect stationary objects and the corresponding emergency braking functionality, this is a really serious problem and needs to be addressed, perhaps with a recall to require installation of RADAR in all the new cars and re-enabling of it.
    • awfml 5y ago
      I think its probably more likely the driver made a user error— tens of thousands of people use autopilot every day in stop and go traffic
      • raylad 5y ago
        Stop and go traffic is not the same. In stop and go traffic, the car in front of you is visible to the camera at all times. In this case, my car may not have been acquired by the camera before it was already stationary, in which case it might have been ignored, causing the accident.
• a-dub 5y ago
  i have questions. 1) how high of a speed, exactly? 2) it rear ended you twice? as in it smacked into you, decided that wasn't enough and either waited for you to pull forward or for the cars to separate and then accelerated into you again? if it actually did this, this is downright comical. i'd wager the driver was involved in the second collision though. (which should be considered a failure of the system nonetheless, as driver+autopilot operate as a single system, where if the state of the system leaves the bewildered driver manually accelerating the car into a collision, that is still a degenerate state!)
• buffington 5y ago
  I drive a Tesla. If my car rear ends another car, that's my fault. Doesn't matter if I had Autopilot on or not. Imagine if you were rear ended by a Toyota and the driver said "it was on cruise control, shrug." Would you talk to NTSB or NHTSA about that? Probably not. The only scenario I can imagine that'd warrant investigation is if the driver were completely unable to override Autopilot. Similar investigations have been started by NTSB when Toyota had issues with their cruise control systems several years ago.
  • amelius 5y ago
    > I drive a Tesla. If my car rear ends another car, that's my fault. Doesn't matter if I had Autopilot on or not. You can have a similar argument for: if I'm drunk while driving that's my choice; if I don't cause any accidents, it should be none of anybody's business that I'm drunk. You see, it doesn't work like that. If Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users, then an investigation is warranted.
    • zamadatix 5y ago
      An NTSB investigation is a separate thing from an accident investigation for fault or insurance purposes. The NTSB does not investigate a drunk driver, that does not mean the drunk driver would be free of fault or charges.
      • MerelyMortal 5y ago
        A more apt comparison would be if OP was hit by a drunk driver, and there were no laws against drunk driving. It would be appropriate to ask the government to investigate whether or not drunk driving is safe, because it could happen to many more people.
        • situationista 5y ago
          Except that both Tesla and the law make it clear that in a Level 2 system the driver is responsible at all times, regardless of whether Autopilot is engaged or not.
• kjhughes 5y ago
  > There were two impacts somehow. It was a 4-car pileup and my car was destroyed. Likely explanation for two impacts during a rear-end pileup: 1. Tesla rear-ends your car. 2. Another car rear-ends the Tesla, propelling it forward and hitting your car a second time.
  • raylad 5y ago
    Tesla was rear car. Nothing else hit it. It hit me twice.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • cbo100 5y ago
      Doesn't this indicate that she was likely "panic braking" on the accelerator? This would override AEB / TACC on any vehicle I own, radar or not.
      • raylad 5y ago
        Yes, I thought that could be the case too, but no way to know without seeing the logs.
      • hasdf 5y ago
        yeah this seems to be the most likely scenario. It sounds like the original poster's car was in the middle, tesla was at the end. OP's car suddenly breaks (or hits someone), tesla either does not react fast enough or starts reacting and then the tesla driver hits the gas pedal (meaning to break). Still not sure how they would be able to hit it twice if they hadn't backed up though.
        • raylad 5y ago
          I slowed down gradually and was already stopped at the red light with 2 cars in front of me when the Tesla plowed into my car.
    • 5y ago
• atdrummond 5y ago
  Reach out to Jalopnik - this is right up their alley.
• mrshadowgoose 5y ago
  "The driver said she was using Autopilot" "she had actually had the same kind of collision on Autopilot previously!" I've got a hypothesis...and it has nothing to do with autopilot being faulty.
  • taxcoder 5y ago
    Likely an error in the seat to steering wheel connector - used to see it all the time when I worked on cars.
• MaxBareiss 5y ago
  Correct me if this is what you meant by "talked with the NHTSA", but another place you can submit information is to the NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation (ODI): https://www.nhtsa.gov/report-a-safety-problem#index https://www.nhtsa.gov/report-a-safety-problem#index , which is the group that forces automakers to do recalls. In my opinion (PhD student in vehicle safety) it doesn't sound severe or novel enough for the NTSB to investigate. NTSB has done good reports on a couple of similar Tesla Autopilot crashes (https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/?NTSBNumber=HWY18FH011 https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/?NTSBNumber=HWY18FH011 https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/?NTSBNumber=HWY16FH018 https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/?NTSBNumber=HWY16FH018). minor note: NHTSA is spoken as "nit-sah" so "NHTSA" is better than "the NHTSA". NTSB is spoken as "N-T-S-B" and is fine.
• modeless 5y ago
  Detecting stationary objects is a known issue with every driver assist system. No automaker's system guarantees that it will stop for stationary objects. In fact they all explicitly state that they may not. It's a known and disclosed and accepted risk of these systems. Ford: "may not detect stationary or slow moving vehicles" https://www.fordservicecontent.com/Ford_Content/Catalog/owner_information/2021-Ford-Mustang-Mach-E-Owners-Manual-version-1_om_EN-US_09_2020-1.pdf https://www.fordservicecontent.com/Ford_Content/Catalog/owne... Tesla: "may not recognize or detect oncoming vehicles, stationary objects, and special-use lanes such as those used exclusively for bikes, carpools, emergency vehicles, etc" https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-0535381F-643F-4C60-85AB-1783E723B9B6.html https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-0535381... GM: "may not detect and react to stopped or slow-moving vehicles ahead of you" https://my.chevrolet.com/content/dam/gmownercenter/gmna/dynamic/manuals/2022/chevrolet/bolt-ev/2022-chevrolet-bolt-ev-owners-manual.pdf https://my.chevrolet.com/content/dam/gmownercenter/gmna/dyna... etc. You can find it in every brand's manual. NTSB and NHTSA knew that this risk existed when they approved these systems. There is nothing to investigate.
  • raylad 5y ago
    Yes, but there is usually an additional system like Toyota's Safety Stop which WILL detect a stationary object and kick in at the last minute to reduce speed by N MPH before collision. AFAIK Tesla used to have that via its RADAR but because the new production has no RADAR, new cars can't have it, and they disabled it on the older cars too, in the interest of using a single software version. At least this is what I've gathered from reading here and elsewhere.
    • modeless 5y ago
      Radar is useless for detecting stationary objects because of far too many false positives. Radar is the reason why these warnings exist. It is not the solution. Teslas continue to have forward collision warning and automatic emergency braking as standard features whether or not they have radar. But again, they do not detect 100% of all stationary objects and neither does any other automaker's system.
• AlexandrB 5y ago
  I think the comments section here neatly summarizes how liability for any self-driving bugs will be foisted onto individual drivers. This was once a big question mark for me - who would be liable in a self-driving crash, the driver or the manufacturer? Apparently individuals want to be liable. It's not clear whether this is the result of marketing or ideology.
  • lvs 5y ago
    Consumer protection is weak in the US. In numerous cases of faulty products and negligent manufacturers, failures of regulatory agencies to intervene eventually escalates into class actions of victims, owners, or state AGs against manufacturers -- with variable outcomes. We've seen it with opioids, cigarettes, guns, diet pills, etc..
  • krisoft 5y ago
    It is not a self-driving car unless you can have a sleep in it while it takes you where you need to go in my opinion. :) Take a real self-driving car for example: a waymo taxi you are riding in rear-ends an other car. Do you think you will be responsible for it?
• lnanek2 5y ago
  Maybe it is being investigated and you don't know. For both drivers, your responsibility begins and ends with getting a police report done and informing the insurance companies, then they'll fight it out. If they think they can go after Tesla, instead of one of them paying, they will. You aren't going to hear about it regardless.
• dalys 5y ago
  My VW Passat was on ACC and LKAS just a week ago when it suddenly stopped detecting the car in front and was about to drive into it. This was also at a red light. As I was actually paying attention, I just hit the brakes manually. Technology isnt perfect. This happens to all cars.
  • a-dub 5y ago
    i recently rented a late model rav4 and played around with the lane keeping and radar cruise control. it kinda drove like a drunk lead footed teenager. it was cool conceptually, but it didn't seem to work very well and it was a rough ride of heavy acceleration and deceleration with occasional odd steering choices. it also had these lights on the mirrors that would light up when someone was in the blind spots, which ultimately were kind of annoying/distracting. it felt like maybe the ui for these features, which seemed to push you towards setting adaptive cruise and lane keeping, and then letting the car do the rest, wasn't really in line with the actual capabilities of the system. although, maybe i just wasn't used to it. it would certainly do scary things like accelerate harshly upon cars ahead when the road was curved or had small hills that temporarily obscured direct line of sight to them.
• szundi 5y ago
  Just imagine that you're a person who constantly lies about anything just to feel better. You have a Tesla. You made a mistake and hit this car. You get out, what do you say. That's what I thought. Obviously this is just one possible scenario, one of the others is OP's interpretation that the lady was telling the truth.
  • raylad 5y ago
    My interpretation is that it may or may not be what happened, and should be investigated.
• darthvoldemort 5y ago
  NTSB and NHTSA can't investigate every single complaint. That's unfortunately not scalable. They would need to talk to the driver, talk to Tesla, get the data, etc. All for something that's handled through civil lawsuits. You can sue the driver because ultimately she is at fault, and if she wants to sue Tesla, that's her prerogative. This makes sense to me.
  • Drunk_Engineer 5y ago
    The problem is that NTSB has a bizarro prioritization scheme. They have spent huge efforts investigating things like hot air balloon crashes, and even Harrison Ford's crash landing a vintage airplane into a golf course. The crazier the incident, the more likely they investigate -- which is completely opposite of how they should be prioritizing. The result is that the common, everyday rear-end car crashes are just written off.
    • tick_tock_tick 5y ago
      It's not hard to figure out the companies themselves and other agency work well enough at solving the common reproducible errors the NTSB focuses on the edge cases that would otherwise go unanswered.
      • Drunk_Engineer 5y ago
        The US has one of the worst road safety records of any modern industrialized country. The reason is that other agencies have actually not solved the "common reproducible" errors at all.
• jmpman 5y ago
  I have a Model 3. The autopilot was acting weird while driving on the freeway, sometime disengaging, but mostly not tracking the lane smoothly. For an unrelated reason, I opted to view my camera footage, and was shocked to find that my camera was completely blurry. I’m driving down the freeway at 75mph, being guided by a camera that couldn’t pass a standard driver’s vision test. Tesla came out to replace the camera, and it appeared that a film had been deposited on the windshield, obscuring the camera. Living in Phoenix, my car is parked outside, facing south west. During Covid, I’d go many days at a time without driving, and in the summer, the interior temperatures can easily rise over 150f. Within the camera enclosure, there’s a reflection absorbing material, which likely creates a perfect miniature greenhouse. I believe the glue in the camera housing melted/evaporated at these elevated temperatures and deposited on the windshield. Concerned that others would experience this problem, I opened a case with the NHTSA. Crickets. There could be many people driving around on autopilot, with obstructed vision, due to this same failure mode. It’s something Tesla could easily check, and something NHTSA should be investigating. For something as safety critical as a forward facing camera, you’d expect both Tesla and NHTSA would be investigating. I have no indication that anything has happened as a result of my filing. Possibly because nobody else has reported the issue - maybe because nobody else is actively viewing their camera footage? There’s no other way for a Tesla owner to be aware of the issue. Frustrating.
  • natch 5y ago
    There are five forward facing cameras on a Model 3. Was it all five of them that were blurry? How could you tell? Or just the one selected as the frontmost one on the dash cam video?
    • jmpman 5y ago
      Just the one that’s visible on the dashcam video, but the enclosure where all (I’m not aware of any other place) the forward facing cameras reside, the window was covered in a haze. Do you know of any way to view the other camera feeds? Are there any other forward facing cameras which aren’t behind the rear view mirror? https://imgur.com/a/KDkjbuF https://imgur.com/a/KDkjbuF https://imgur.com/a/vEbpzPo https://imgur.com/a/vEbpzPo
• floatingatoll 5y ago
  If you're in California, you could file an OL-316 since a citizen could reasonably expect to think that this is an example of a "traffic collision involving an autonomous vehicle", and Tesla is a licensed member of that program. At worst, they'll refuse the report for some reason or another.
• dmitrygr 5y ago
  Tell your insurance company. Nobody is as motivated as them to make the other driver/car manufacturer/etc pay/hurt/apologize/etc. Then talk to reporters. Sadly in today's world, if it isn't trending on Twitter, it didn't happen. Sorry Hope you are physically ok and unhurt.
  • HWR_14 5y ago
    > Nobody is as motivated as them to make the other driver/car manufacturer/etc pay/hurt/apologize/etc. I don't know why you think that. Insurance companies working together is an iterated game with no clear end point. It makes all the insurance companies more money if they just settle all claims as quickly as possible, as long as the total money changing hands among all claims is correct to within the margin of how much much they save from not investigating.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• trhway 5y ago
  an idea for startup - a flat screen mounted on the back of your car and a rear looking AI. Once it recognizes say Tesla behind you, it will display on the screen an image which is known to be successfully recognized by Tesla, so it wouldn't rear-end you. Of course it isn't limited to Tesla. Also there is very good business case for subscription as Tesla and the others update their autonomous AI, the users would need updates to that anti-rear-ending software.
• op00to 5y ago
  You should delete this post, stop talking to people, and get a really good lawyer because you are gonna get a little bit of Elon’s billions!
• deegles 5y ago
  I ask this every time there's an article about Autopilot behaving badly and still no good answer... What is a (hypothetical) situation where Autopilot would definitely be responsible for an accident? Not brushed off as "the driver is responsible and should have had hands on the wheel at all times."
  • paxys 5y ago
    Not until level 5 is rolled out – so potentially never.
  • conductr 5y ago
    I think that's the problem, they've been allowed to legalese away all liability. There would have to be an OTA update so bug ridden that it caused multiple accidents in short order and with major carnage. In that instance, someone might notice the "trend" or public outcry would become loud enough.
  • gpm 5y ago
    An accident where it failed to listen to the driver overriding it and did the bad thing anyways, would be an unambiguous case. A trend where it was frequently (over the background human accident rate) making decisions that resulted in it switching from driving normally to an accident being inevitable in less time than a human can react. Something like it frequently sharply turning the wheels at highway speed. Short of something like that which takes agency away from the driver, the driver is in control and responsible for the vehicle, whether they are using assistive technology or not. Accidents also happen already, it doesn't make sense to insist on assistive technology being superhuman at avoiding them.
• lucb1e 5y ago
  Does it need to be investigated for you to get insurance payout? If not, I don't really understand your reason for asking. Non-software-driven rear-endings don't usually lead to investigating the mental stability of the driver, and so long as there isn't an unusually high case of accidents with this software (as in, higher-than-human rates)... This is n=1 for all we know, or am I missing any information?
• xedeon 5y ago
  Here's an idea. Maybe she said she was on autopilot as a cop out? She could also have her foot on the accelerator which disables automatic stopping (clearly shown to the driver as a warning) when autopilot and traffic-aware cruise control (TACC) is engaged. If this is truly a substantiated issue. Hundreds of Tesla owners would have created threads on the forums below. That would indicate a trend which will prompt NHTSA to take action: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/forums/-/list https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/forums/-/list https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/ But alas, a quick cursory search yielded nothing. There was another media frenzy a while back. Falsely claiming sudden unintended acceleration (SUA) on Tesla vehicles. The result? "NHTSA determines sudden acceleration complaints in Tesla vehicles were due to driver error" “There is no evidence of any fault in the accelerator pedal assemblies, motor control systems, or brake systems that has contributed to any of the cited incidents" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqTXhKVtQbU&t=203s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqTXhKVtQbU&t=203s https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/08/nhtsa-tesla-sudden-unintended-acceleration-driver-error/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/08/nhtsa-tesla-sudden-uninten...
  • trollied 5y ago
    This needs more visibility
  • misiti3780 5y ago
    You need to be careful pointing out anything like this on HN. If you have havn't noticed, it's really cool to hate anything TSLA these days.
    • xedeon 5y ago
      I know anything Tesla gets some people too excited. But it should never be at the cost of being objective.
• elil17 5y ago
  You could ask the other driver to file a complaint - seems like she’s not too happy with it either. You could talk to the inspectors general responsible for NHTSA and NTSB - they can investigate why those two aren’t investigating. Only other option would be to sue Tesla. You’ll have a claim if your damages aren’t paid for by the other driver/her insurance (e.g. the damages exceed the insurance limit, so you get to sue either her or Tesla). However, you’d be better of financially suing her. If she’s uninsured she could sue Tesla to cover the damages. Perhaps some public interest law firm would want to take up the case - that could make suing practical.
• soheil 5y ago
  I'm not sure what you think Autopilot is. It's basically adaptive cruise control which almost all new cars have. As shocking as this may sound like the onus is on the driver to avoid a high speed collision when approaching a stopped car at a red light. The driver should push the brake petal. Just because it was a Tesla somehow this is a problem that NTSB and NHTSA need to investigate? But if it was a Honda Civic it's just an accident?
• sidibe 5y ago
  Last week Tesla rolled out an update to all of its FSD beta users that caused rogue FCWs leading to dangerous sudden braking. Somehow they didn't catch this internally but most of their customers seemed to notice it the first day. It's clear that Tesla doesn't test their software enough
• ProjectArcturis 5y ago
  Talk to a good lawyer, see if you have a case to sue Tesla. They'll only fix this if it costs them money.
• esalman 5y ago
  I'm happy to be driving on the road with other human drivers and have them crash into me. As long as I can prove I was not at fault, I can expect fair compensation. It seems if robots crash into me, I cannot expect fair compensation because whoever programmed the robot can't be held accountable!
• oblib 5y ago
  Really sorry to hear this. I really cannot see how this bullshit is allowed on our roads. We're all guinea pigs for this insane experiment when the truth is we know it cannot work well enough to not kill and maim people. Our government, as you've proved, is completely asleep at the wheel here.
  • soheil 5y ago
    > Our government, as you've proved, is completely asleep at the wheel here. Um, and not the driver?
    • oblib 5y ago
      My comment was not about the driver. It was about our Gov's response to the OP's efforts to report this, or more accurately, our Gov's complete lack of one. I'll try real hard to be clearer for you in the future.
• iamleppert 5y ago
  Tesla does the bare minimum when it comes to software QA on their autopilot. Looking at the codebase can tell you a few things: - There are few, if any unit tests. - No regression tests, no integration tests. - CI is “something to aspire to have one day” - Uses thousands of open source dependencies, many of which are updated randomly based on if a developer needs or wants to. - No code review process. - Lots of commented out code, dead code. - No code linters or pre-commit process. - About 5 different architectures due to in part constant churn on the team. Anyone who allows the “Tesla autopilot” would think twice if they actually knew the quality of code that they are betting their lives on. It’s a dumpster fire.
  • poundofshrimp 5y ago
    Source?
  • aeharding 5y ago
    > Anyone who allows the “Tesla autopilot” would think twice if they actually knew the quality of code that they are betting their lives on. It’s a dumpster fire. Worse yet, other drivers, and especially vulnerable pedestrians and bicyclists, have no option to opt-out of Autopilot being tested on them, with potentially fatal results
• soheil 5y ago
  > The driver said she was using Autopilot, that an OTA update had had a problem earlier in the day, and that she had actually had the same kind of collision on Autopilot previously! She had the same type of high speed collision in the past and continues to keep relying on Autopilot so heavily to cause yet another collision? I mean is the average high collision rate for Tesla drivers close to 2? Or is it just this driver?
• aaron695 5y ago
  What's with all the dumb comments that the Tesla and driver was at fault? Yes they were. End of story. OP doesn't say where weren't. Is that how the HN brain works, you just make up stuff in your head? OP wants an investigation. They don't necessarily get that. They get payment for damage to person / vehicle. How insurance companies work it up to them really. How NTSB and NHTSA work I have no idea. But one assumes just because someone is cranky they got hit by a car and forwarded a story from a third person is perhaps not good enough?
• manicdee 5y ago
  "Tesla rear-ended another car while on autopilot" is an immediate red flag in any discussion about car accidents. It shows that the writer is about to launch on a rant with a clear agenda, and this is an argument in which facts, logic and critical thinking are not going to be welcomed. You were upset that someone hit you, that's fair. You then swallowed the at-fault driver's story hook line and sinker, and now instead of being angry at the other driver for being negligent you're angry at the NHTSA for not Taking Me Seriously™. 11/10 to the at fault driver for such skilled deflection where she managed to not only avoid responsibility for her mistake but amplified your rage to the point that not only did you absolve the at-fault driver and blame the manufacturer of the car they were driving, but you are now angry at a regulatory agency for not taking immediate, decisive and visible action on a single word of mouth report. TL;DR: you've been played. Double check the contact details the at-fault driver gave you.
• oxplot 5y ago
  > they will only investigate if they "see a trend". That's your answer right there. It's awful what's happened to you and your car but if this issue affects one in XXX (some large number) customers, it doesn't warrant the NHSTA's time which I'm sure has a large existing backlog of issues to investigate.
• powerbroker 5y ago
  Is it OK for this disclaimer to apply to Tesla cars for 6-years (after initial SW/HW release)? "NOTE: Traffic-Aware Cruise Control is a BETA feature." How about after 10 years? Is it OK to retire a feature, without ever taking it out of BETA? Or is there some obligation, for a SW developer to actually produce working SW?
• natch 5y ago
  There is a lot missing from this story. How old was the Model S? How did nobody hit her from behind if it was a four car pileup as you say elsewhere? It was all her plowing into four cars? What follow distance setting did she have it on? What were the road conditions? Dark? Light? Snow? Ice? Dry? Sandy? Flat? What was the speed limit on this highway? How long had the light been red? Was the light functioning properly? Two impacts could simply be a bounce of either your car or her car. Not some mystery, right? Where did this happen? Are there any reports online (local law enforcement, etc.) about what happened? What happened shortly before? (i.e. How long had you been stopped at the light?) Were the four cars involved all cars that she hit directly, or was it a domino effect? Where were you relative to the other two cars besides the Tesla that were affected? None of this is to excuse the Tesla, just a lot of info missing here that would be interesting to hear.
• giantg2 5y ago
  Welcome to government bureaucracy and understaffing. I had a similar issue with a rights violation last year - nobody cares or investigates, just pass the buck. Your, or their, insurance might investigate (somewhat unlikely). You can try to complain to Telsa, but I think they are more concerned about sweeping negative stuff under the rug whenever possible. Your state DOT might be interested in the report. I doubt they'll really look into unless there are a bunch of similar incidents. "... she had actually had the same kind of collision on Autopilot previously!" Sounds like someone is extremely ignorant or doesn't value their life. Why would she trust a safety critical system that failed and caused a crash previously?