4 ms·

That's part of the issue - Elon says that LIDAR is "a deadend" and removed radar from Teslas as being "unnecessary", because their cameras "could do everything

That's part of the issue - Elon says that LIDAR is "a deadend" and removed radar from Teslas as being "unnecessary", because their cameras "could do everything needed". Either one of those would have detected this. My Audi's radar works great in pea soup fog. Has prevented me from nearly rear-ending a gray vehicle with no lights on in heavy fog.

criddell 5y ago
Removing LIDAR could still be the right call even if it means accidents like this still happen or even happen more often. If removing LIDAR lowers the cost of the vehicles which means more of them are sold which results in a fewer accidents and fatalities overall, then I think it's the right call.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  > more of them are sold which results in a fewer accidents and fatalities overall This argument needs to be fleshed out more after a video like this surfaces. I can't accept at face value that this style of autonomous car, which has demonstrated issues running into parked and stationary objects, is the platform which when mass distributed will reduce overall accidents and fatalities. It's clear from this video that this vehicle doesn't know when it's blind, and will merrily carry on at 75 mph even though it has no idea what's going on around it. If you are driving in the dark or the fog and you can't see 12 seconds in front of you, you slow down until you can. Not Tesla apparently -- it will continue on at 75mph even though it can't break in time if something emerges in front of it. How is this the technological basis of a something that promises to lower overall fatalities? How does this get better with scale? Seems to me, based on this repeatedly demonstrated mode of failure, scale will only reveal how broken their self driving system is. Why is it accepted here that filling the road with autonomous cars that don't know when they're blind and run into parked objects will somehow result in a net positive outcome? Moreover, how is Tesla in particular the company which is going to deliver these safer vehicles that make our roads safer? Tesla has a history and culture of deception in their marketing. They haven't taken these accidents seriously in their engineering and product design. Teslas have been running into stationary objects for 5+ years now and they show no sign of fixing that. Call me crazy but if I were shipping a driverless car technology, I'd want to make sure it didn't run into things. Maybe that's just me? Tesla recklessly released this flawed technology and product to actual consumers for use on actual roads. How are these the actions of a safety-focused company? From my perspective, if you flood the roads with Teslas, you're not going to get safer roads, you're going to get more Twitter threads with videos like this. The claim that this will necessarily lead to safer roads is yet to be proven.
  - criddell 5y ago
    Look at all the fatalities and less serious crashes and you should be able to calculate if Teslas are over or under represented in that data. I honestly have no idea if they are or are not. I think you underestimate how bad human drivers are. In the US, something like 100 people per day are killed in car crashes. Depending on how many Teslas are on the road, seeing a video like this every day may not be that surprising. If bugs in self driving tech kills 10,000 people per year (30 a day) but the overall fatality rate drops from 35k to 25k per year, it could be seen as a win.
    - ModernMech 5y ago
      I get it. I understand that argument and it is a good utilitarian argument. What I'm saying is Tesla has proven they aren't the company to bring about that future. Tesla as an organization has demonstrated a level of corporate sociopathy that tells me they don't take safety seriously as a culture. Surely, they tout safety as a selling point but their actions tell me they are far more interested in getting driverless cars on the street quickly than doing so safely. You can't achieve sweeping victories in safety without intentionality. Tesla may claim that safety is a priority for them, but if that were true they wouldn't lie to their customers about the capabilities of their own products. They wouldn't eschew industry best practices as far has hardware is concerned. They wouldn't beta test unproven software on their customers and charge them for it, leading to bodily harm of their customers and others. They would fully investigate problems as they occur and definitively fix them instead of allowing concerning issues to persist for half a decade now (running into large stationary objects). There are many organizations working on driverless cars, and yet Tesla is the only one that behaves this way. I really hope we as a community have grown past the idea that simply throwing technology into the world will have positive net benefits as long as there are good or good-adjacent intentions behind them. In fact, it takes planning and execution to ensure good outcomes. Simply doing something that can be cast as a boon for safety does not guarantee a boon for safety if safety isn't a top goal. And by top I mean it has to be #1 or #2, because any lower and other priorities eat into it.
- ars 5y ago
  > more of them are sold which results in a fewer accidents and fatalities overall, then I think it's the right call. Except that every bit of available evidence shows that not only do self driving cars not reduce fatalities, there is no reason to expect that they will. People are surprisingly good drivers - the reason there are so many accidents is simply that people drive so much. I ran some numbers many years ago showing this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12012166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12012166 check them if you like.

criddell 5y ago

Removing LIDAR could still be the right call even if it means accidents like this still happen or even happen more often. If removing LIDAR lowers the cost of the vehicles which means more of them are sold which results in a fewer accidents and fatalities overall, then I think it's the right call.

ModernMech 5y ago
> more of them are sold which results in a fewer accidents and fatalities overall This argument needs to be fleshed out more after a video like this surfaces. I can't accept at face value that this style of autonomous car, which has demonstrated issues running into parked and stationary objects, is the platform which when mass distributed will reduce overall accidents and fatalities. It's clear from this video that this vehicle doesn't know when it's blind, and will merrily carry on at 75 mph even though it has no idea what's going on around it. If you are driving in the dark or the fog and you can't see 12 seconds in front of you, you slow down until you can. Not Tesla apparently -- it will continue on at 75mph even though it can't break in time if something emerges in front of it. How is this the technological basis of a something that promises to lower overall fatalities? How does this get better with scale? Seems to me, based on this repeatedly demonstrated mode of failure, scale will only reveal how broken their self driving system is. Why is it accepted here that filling the road with autonomous cars that don't know when they're blind and run into parked objects will somehow result in a net positive outcome? Moreover, how is Tesla in particular the company which is going to deliver these safer vehicles that make our roads safer? Tesla has a history and culture of deception in their marketing. They haven't taken these accidents seriously in their engineering and product design. Teslas have been running into stationary objects for 5+ years now and they show no sign of fixing that. Call me crazy but if I were shipping a driverless car technology, I'd want to make sure it didn't run into things. Maybe that's just me? Tesla recklessly released this flawed technology and product to actual consumers for use on actual roads. How are these the actions of a safety-focused company? From my perspective, if you flood the roads with Teslas, you're not going to get safer roads, you're going to get more Twitter threads with videos like this. The claim that this will necessarily lead to safer roads is yet to be proven.
- criddell 5y ago
  Look at all the fatalities and less serious crashes and you should be able to calculate if Teslas are over or under represented in that data. I honestly have no idea if they are or are not. I think you underestimate how bad human drivers are. In the US, something like 100 people per day are killed in car crashes. Depending on how many Teslas are on the road, seeing a video like this every day may not be that surprising. If bugs in self driving tech kills 10,000 people per year (30 a day) but the overall fatality rate drops from 35k to 25k per year, it could be seen as a win.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    I get it. I understand that argument and it is a good utilitarian argument. What I'm saying is Tesla has proven they aren't the company to bring about that future. Tesla as an organization has demonstrated a level of corporate sociopathy that tells me they don't take safety seriously as a culture. Surely, they tout safety as a selling point but their actions tell me they are far more interested in getting driverless cars on the street quickly than doing so safely. You can't achieve sweeping victories in safety without intentionality. Tesla may claim that safety is a priority for them, but if that were true they wouldn't lie to their customers about the capabilities of their own products. They wouldn't eschew industry best practices as far has hardware is concerned. They wouldn't beta test unproven software on their customers and charge them for it, leading to bodily harm of their customers and others. They would fully investigate problems as they occur and definitively fix them instead of allowing concerning issues to persist for half a decade now (running into large stationary objects). There are many organizations working on driverless cars, and yet Tesla is the only one that behaves this way. I really hope we as a community have grown past the idea that simply throwing technology into the world will have positive net benefits as long as there are good or good-adjacent intentions behind them. In fact, it takes planning and execution to ensure good outcomes. Simply doing something that can be cast as a boon for safety does not guarantee a boon for safety if safety isn't a top goal. And by top I mean it has to be #1 or #2, because any lower and other priorities eat into it.
ars 5y ago
> more of them are sold which results in a fewer accidents and fatalities overall, then I think it's the right call. Except that every bit of available evidence shows that not only do self driving cars not reduce fatalities, there is no reason to expect that they will. People are surprisingly good drivers - the reason there are so many accidents is simply that people drive so much. I ran some numbers many years ago showing this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12012166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12012166 check them if you like.