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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 Aut

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.
    - xeromal 5y ago
      We won't know until the lady provides you with evidence that her AP was actually on, but my guess is that she fucked up and she's just using AP to offset blame.
      - raylad 5y ago
        Exactly: An investigation would find out what happened.
        practice9 5y ago
        Please post an update when the investigation concludes
        raylad 5y ago
        The main point of this thread is that I don't know how to actually get an investigation to happen!
        xeromal 5y ago
        The insurance company handles it.
- eightysixfour 5y ago
  > 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. It is the other way around. They've stopped using RADAR because RADAR has too many false reflections at speed and it was causing learning issues in the ML dataset. The vision based position detection is better (could argue about weather and visibility here, but it is irrelevant to this convo). Reliance on RADAR was causing it to hit stopped objects, because it was relying on radar data that was already too jittery and had to be ignored. Regardless of the RADAR issue, the driver is responsible for the vehicle at all times. If someone hits you using cruise control they remain at fault.
  - yupper32 5y ago
    > If someone hits you using cruise control they remain at fault. That'd be relevant if they didn't call it autopilot. If they called it lane assist or cruise control plus or something then I'd agree. Tesla is at major fault for implying that the Teslas can drive themselves, even if the driver is also at fault.
    - mwint 5y ago
      Tesla could call it Egre-MuzzFlorp and it wouldn’t matter. The surveys showing people think “autopilot” means “can drive itself” were fatally flawed, in that they were done with non-Tesla owners.
      - yupper32 5y ago
        And yet, people drive their Teslas as if it means "can drive itself". Words matter. You'd need real evidence to convince me that Tesla calling the system "Autopilot" hasn't significantly contributed to crashes.
        mwint 5y ago
        On the contrary, we need real evidence suggesting it does. Certainly the population level crash data doesn’t support it.
- krisoft 5y ago
  Radar is not good for detecting stationary objects. Of course you get a nice reflection back from a stationary car but you get a similarly nice reflection from an overhead trafic light or a manhole cover or a dropped nail. Because of this every automotive radar ever fielded gates out the stationary objects. If you wouldn’t you would get a crazy amount of false positives. They can do this because the radar measures the relative speed of objects via dopler shift, and you know the speed of your own vehicle. Anything which has the same speed as you have but goes in the other direction is most likely stationary. (Or moving perpendicular to you. The velocity difference is vectorial, but dopler can only observe the component along the observation vector, and civilian radars have terrible angular resolution.) In short: nobody ever used radar to stop cars from hitting stationary objects. This is not a Tesla specific thing.
_ea1k 5y ago
To be fair to scenario A, I've seen one other video of a driver reporting AP hitting the car in front of them during a rapid slowdown in traffic. Its hard to say how widespread it is, if the NHTSA isn't wanting to investigate.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Or D) Tesla stops instantly when it hits OP once by itself and again when the person behind it hits it. (Spare me the low effort comment about how everyone should be prepared for the car in front of them to stop instantly because it hit something, statistically nobody drives like that) Edit: I misinterpreted the OP about it being an four car pileup.
- raylad 5y ago
  No other car hit the Tesla from behind. It hit me with two impacts all by itself.
  - TheParkShark 5y ago
    You said it was a 4 car accident? She hit you from behind and you hit the car in front of you which hit the car in front of it? Did you end up hitting the car in front of you twice because she hit you twice?
- Zanni 5y ago
  Dude. It's not a "low effort comment" to point that out, it's literally the law. If you can't stop when the person in front of you stops, you're too close. Increase your following distance. Don't let others bad habits justify your own.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    > If you can't stop when the person in front of you stops, you're too close If the other driver decides to randomly brake in the middle of the road (as some Teslas have been known to do), it's not necessarily the person behind's fault.
    - speedgoose 5y ago
      In my part of the world, it's always the person's behind fault.
practice9 5y ago
I would assign a large probability that Autopilot wasn't even engaged and it's driver's fault. Accidents with Tesla (many of those that make the press) are often caused by not being accustomed to the car's acceleration. There is Chill mode that decreases max acceleration, but I wouldn't expect the driver who manages to get into 2 accidents with a same car to read a manual
- filoleg 5y ago
  Yeah, the first thing that came to mind was that one valet who claimed that it was not his fault, but the autopilot that made him accelerate heavily and crash inside a parking garage.[0] People called out bs on it instantly, as it would make no sense for autopilot to suddenly accelerate inside a garage until the crash, but the driver defended himself to death. Only for the formal investigation to happen and confirm that the driver did it himself by fully pressing on the acceleration pedal instead of the braking pedal without any autopilot engagement, and was just trying to shift blame. And no, it wasn't just Tesla's legal team claiming that. The guy went to a third-party service that could decode the blackbox data from the car (again, that was his own technician, not requested by Tesla or anything), and the evidence clearly showed that the driver pressed the accelerator full-on. The raw log that is relevant to the situation is included in the link as well, in case someone wants to see it with their eyes. Almost every single article I've seen that features bizarre accidents like this ended up being bs, and I am seeing the "accidentally pushed the accelerator instead of the braking pedal" vibes here as well. Will be eagerly awaiting for the results of the investigation before I make my own judgement though. Note: I am not claiming that autopilot is infallible, and there were indeed some legitimate incidents a while ago. But this specific one in the OP? Yeah, I call bs. It also helps that NHTSA has already investigated such claims before[1], so they looked into hundreds of cases that were claiming Autopilot suddenly accelerating and causing crashes, and they discovered that not a single one happened due to autopilot, but due to the driver misapplying acceleration and braking pedal. Direct quote from their investigation summary (emphasis mine): >After reviewing the available data, ODI has not identified evidence that would support opening a defect investigation into SUA in the subject vehicles. In every instance in which event data was available for review by ODI, the evidence shows that SUA crashes in the complaints cited by the petitioner have been caused by pedal misapplication. 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. There is no evidence of a design factor contributing to increased likelihood of pedal misapplication. 0. https://insideevs.com/news/496305/valet-crashes-tesla-data-recorder-legal-case/ https://insideevs.com/news/496305/valet-crashes-tesla-data-r... 1. https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2020/INCLA-DP20001-6158.PDF https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2020/INCLA-DP20001-6158.PDF
pessimizer 5y ago
> Most certainly a conspiratorial cover-up by Tesla, the NTSB, and the NHTSA. You're just adding the word "conspiracy" to imply blaming the car is insane. You skipped "Possible scenario D: It's the car's fault, and the NTSB and NHTSA didn't respond due to a lack of interest, an incompetent person handling the complaint by the OP, the OP not being able to communicate what happened well enough, or a procedure at the agencies which requires the driver to make a complaint rather than an observer or a victim."

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.
  - xeromal 5y ago
    We won't know until the lady provides you with evidence that her AP was actually on, but my guess is that she fucked up and she's just using AP to offset blame.
    - raylad 5y ago
      Exactly: An investigation would find out what happened.
      - practice9 5y ago
        Please post an update when the investigation concludes
        raylad 5y ago
        The main point of this thread is that I don't know how to actually get an investigation to happen!
        xeromal 5y ago
        The insurance company handles it.
eightysixfour 5y ago
> 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. It is the other way around. They've stopped using RADAR because RADAR has too many false reflections at speed and it was causing learning issues in the ML dataset. The vision based position detection is better (could argue about weather and visibility here, but it is irrelevant to this convo). Reliance on RADAR was causing it to hit stopped objects, because it was relying on radar data that was already too jittery and had to be ignored. Regardless of the RADAR issue, the driver is responsible for the vehicle at all times. If someone hits you using cruise control they remain at fault.
- yupper32 5y ago
  > If someone hits you using cruise control they remain at fault. That'd be relevant if they didn't call it autopilot. If they called it lane assist or cruise control plus or something then I'd agree. Tesla is at major fault for implying that the Teslas can drive themselves, even if the driver is also at fault.
  - mwint 5y ago
    Tesla could call it Egre-MuzzFlorp and it wouldn’t matter. The surveys showing people think “autopilot” means “can drive itself” were fatally flawed, in that they were done with non-Tesla owners.
    - yupper32 5y ago
      And yet, people drive their Teslas as if it means "can drive itself". Words matter. You'd need real evidence to convince me that Tesla calling the system "Autopilot" hasn't significantly contributed to crashes.
      - mwint 5y ago
        On the contrary, we need real evidence suggesting it does. Certainly the population level crash data doesn’t support it.
krisoft 5y ago
Radar is not good for detecting stationary objects. Of course you get a nice reflection back from a stationary car but you get a similarly nice reflection from an overhead trafic light or a manhole cover or a dropped nail. Because of this every automotive radar ever fielded gates out the stationary objects. If you wouldn’t you would get a crazy amount of false positives. They can do this because the radar measures the relative speed of objects via dopler shift, and you know the speed of your own vehicle. Anything which has the same speed as you have but goes in the other direction is most likely stationary. (Or moving perpendicular to you. The velocity difference is vectorial, but dopler can only observe the component along the observation vector, and civilian radars have terrible angular resolution.) In short: nobody ever used radar to stop cars from hitting stationary objects. This is not a Tesla specific thing.

_ea1k 5y ago

To be fair to scenario A, I've seen one other video of a driver reporting AP hitting the car in front of them during a rapid slowdown in traffic. Its hard to say how widespread it is, if the NHTSA isn't wanting to investigate.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

Or D) Tesla stops instantly when it hits OP once by itself and again when the person behind it hits it. (Spare me the low effort comment about how everyone should be prepared for the car in front of them to stop instantly because it hit something, statistically nobody drives like that) Edit: I misinterpreted the OP about it being an four car pileup.

raylad 5y ago
No other car hit the Tesla from behind. It hit me with two impacts all by itself.
- TheParkShark 5y ago
  You said it was a 4 car accident? She hit you from behind and you hit the car in front of you which hit the car in front of it? Did you end up hitting the car in front of you twice because she hit you twice?
Zanni 5y ago
Dude. It's not a "low effort comment" to point that out, it's literally the law. If you can't stop when the person in front of you stops, you're too close. Increase your following distance. Don't let others bad habits justify your own.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  > If you can't stop when the person in front of you stops, you're too close If the other driver decides to randomly brake in the middle of the road (as some Teslas have been known to do), it's not necessarily the person behind's fault.
  - speedgoose 5y ago
    In my part of the world, it's always the person's behind fault.

practice9 5y ago

I would assign a large probability that Autopilot wasn't even engaged and it's driver's fault. Accidents with Tesla (many of those that make the press) are often caused by not being accustomed to the car's acceleration. There is Chill mode that decreases max acceleration, but I wouldn't expect the driver who manages to get into 2 accidents with a same car to read a manual

filoleg 5y ago
Yeah, the first thing that came to mind was that one valet who claimed that it was not his fault, but the autopilot that made him accelerate heavily and crash inside a parking garage.[0] People called out bs on it instantly, as it would make no sense for autopilot to suddenly accelerate inside a garage until the crash, but the driver defended himself to death. Only for the formal investigation to happen and confirm that the driver did it himself by fully pressing on the acceleration pedal instead of the braking pedal without any autopilot engagement, and was just trying to shift blame. And no, it wasn't just Tesla's legal team claiming that. The guy went to a third-party service that could decode the blackbox data from the car (again, that was his own technician, not requested by Tesla or anything), and the evidence clearly showed that the driver pressed the accelerator full-on. The raw log that is relevant to the situation is included in the link as well, in case someone wants to see it with their eyes. Almost every single article I've seen that features bizarre accidents like this ended up being bs, and I am seeing the "accidentally pushed the accelerator instead of the braking pedal" vibes here as well. Will be eagerly awaiting for the results of the investigation before I make my own judgement though. Note: I am not claiming that autopilot is infallible, and there were indeed some legitimate incidents a while ago. But this specific one in the OP? Yeah, I call bs. It also helps that NHTSA has already investigated such claims before[1], so they looked into hundreds of cases that were claiming Autopilot suddenly accelerating and causing crashes, and they discovered that not a single one happened due to autopilot, but due to the driver misapplying acceleration and braking pedal. Direct quote from their investigation summary (emphasis mine): >After reviewing the available data, ODI has not identified evidence that would support opening a defect investigation into SUA in the subject vehicles. In every instance in which event data was available for review by ODI, the evidence shows that SUA crashes in the complaints cited by the petitioner have been caused by pedal misapplication. 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. There is no evidence of a design factor contributing to increased likelihood of pedal misapplication. 0. https://insideevs.com/news/496305/valet-crashes-tesla-data-recorder-legal-case/ https://insideevs.com/news/496305/valet-crashes-tesla-data-r... 1. https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2020/INCLA-DP20001-6158.PDF https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2020/INCLA-DP20001-6158.PDF

pessimizer 5y ago

> Most certainly a conspiratorial cover-up by Tesla, the NTSB, and the NHTSA. You're just adding the word "conspiracy" to imply blaming the car is insane. You skipped "Possible scenario D: It's the car's fault, and the NTSB and NHTSA didn't respond due to a lack of interest, an incompetent person handling the complaint by the OP, the OP not being able to communicate what happened well enough, or a procedure at the agencies which requires the driver to make a complaint rather than an observer or a victim."