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That Tesla headline is misleading. Should be “Tesla Removes Rolling Stops from Assertive Driving Profile”. Tesla added rolling stops to make the car behave more
by valine 5y ago
That Tesla headline is misleading. Should be “Tesla Removes Rolling Stops from Assertive Driving Profile”. Tesla added rolling stops to make the car behave more human like. NHTSA said no, so Tesla removed the feature.
- acdha 5y agoIt’s pretty accurate even if you’re a fan of the company. The more accurate description is that they shipped a feature which breaks traffic laws, which is a serious error in a company asking us to trust their judgement in a safety-critical system. Given how many other problems they’ve had and the consistent overselling of their capabilities and safety, that’s an important conversation to have.
- valine 5y agoIt’s not serious at all imho. People roll stop signs all the time, it’s part of driving culture. If you feel obligated to obey the letter of every driving law you could have turned it off in settings. Tesla also has an option to override the speed limit, you want to remove that too?
- acdha 5y agoPeople are also killed or injured by drivers all of the time, too. Remember when the selling point of AVs was that they’d reducr the ~40k / 300k Americans so impacted annually? Telling manufacturers that it’s okay to ignore laws if it gets you there faster will have the opposite effect.
- pmorici 5y agoSafety is measured in accidents per mile driven, lower being better. While there maybe a loose correlation strict obedience to the law is not in itself a measure of safety.
- acdha 5y agoThat metric is misleading since it’s skewed by highway driving where people cover lots of mileage with far fewer points of contention. A better metric would be something like operating time but even there you’d probably want more nuance since different environments have different safety characteristics (someone stuck in traffic on the freeway just doesn’t have as many things to get right as a driver on a city street even if they’re both averaging 5mph). The law actually does have a fairly strong correlation with safety — this is the basis of the claims that something over 90% of collisions are due to driver error – but there is a growing recognition that it’s not enough, and design changes to streets and cars are needed to reduce the number of times where obedience to the law is the only thing protecting someone else.
- pmorici 5y agoYou can use whatever denominator you want but blind obedience to the law isn’t ever going to be a measure of safety.
- Xylakant 5y ago> Tesla also has an option to override the speed limit, you want to remove that too? Yes. The Alternative is to encode “break the law” in software and that makes for a very bad option. Stick to the law, computer.
- judge2020 5y agoThe human driver is the one that told the car to disobey the stop sign[0]. Should every cruise control on every car with speed limit detection forbid the cruise/adaptive cruise to go above the speed limit? 0: the chill setting doesn't roll stop signs https://twitter.com/cooperlund/status/1488549356873695232?s=20&t=wpGxPKT1enE2q-uAyh1IbA https://twitter.com/cooperlund/status/1488549356873695232?s=...
- Xylakant 5y ago> Should every cruise control on every car with speed limit detection forbid the cruise/adaptive cruise to go above the speed limit? Certainly. Why should cruise control be set to above speed limit? Adaptive cruise control should reduce speed to remain within legal boundaries.
- valine 5y agoSpeed limits change, signs are obstructed, some speed limits are only valid for certain times of day. There’s plenty of legal reasons to override the posted speed limit.
- Xylakant 5y agoDrive on manual then, if your computer is not clever enough.
- chipotle_coyote 5y agoI have a car with adaptive cruise control and speed limit detection, and this would absolutely drive me nuts. Not for any philosophical reasons, but because speed limit detection is fallible. On the expressway my apartment is a block away from, which has a speed limit of 50 mph, my car fairly frequently tells me the speed limit is actually 30. It's fairly common for it to read speed limit signs that have conditions on them -- only in effect certain hours, or during school hours, or when light is flashing, or if you're driving a truck -- and incorrectly assume that's the speed limit. Maybe you'd be perfectly happy with "if you don't want the cruise control to make mistakes, just never use it, because gosh darn it, that's better than allowing people to set the adaptive cruise control five miles an hour over the speed limit like they've been able to do with non-adaptive cruise control since it was a thing." I would not, and I would argue I am not the one taking an unreasonable stance.
- gyc 5y ago> People roll stop signs all the time Those people are called bad drivers.
- changoplatanero 5y agono i don't think so. i think if you tried to strictly obey the law at all stop signs you would have a lot of trouble
- smeyer 5y agoWhen does obeying stop signs cause a lot of trouble?
- notch656a 5y agoSpread out over millions of drivers, it can cause many lifetimes worth of time lost from wasteful and inefficient practices, more damage to transmissions and driveshaft from stop-and-go, and increased environment destroying pollution.
- hunterb123 5y agoJust stop at the stop sign so you don't kill a random pedestrian you didn't see while California coasting.
- Teever 5y ago> It’s not serious at all imho. People roll stop signs all the time, it’s part of driving culture This is a terrible line of reasoning. If Tesla ever releases their vaporware humanoid bot would you expect them to program it to rape women in cultures where women rape is part of the culture?
- valine 5y agoI’m gonna go out on a limb and say that rolling stop signs is not a slippery slope to robot rapists.
- Teever 5y agoI think you're right. Programming a several ton machine to disregard laws and potentially kill many pedestrians without warning isn't really comparable to programming a machine to rape -- it's unfathomable worse. I've worked in factories and the idea that a car company can release a machine onto the streets that wouldn't be allowed anywhere near a factory floor is flabbergasting. If a company tried to release a product that had this safety profile in a factory setting the governments and unions would be all over them. The fact that some jackass yokel or senile old lady routinely roll through stop signs daily doesn't justify Tesla releasing a product that does the same.
- valine 5y agoEquating rolling stops to rape has to be the worst argument against FSD I’ve ever heard. I’m honestly at a loss for words. Safely proceeding through an intersection without coming to a complete stop hurts nothing, except maybe the feelings of traffic law puritans.
- caf 5y agoIf a company tried to release a product that had this safety profile in a factory setting the governments and unions would be all over them. I think the same is probably true of cars/trucks in general.
- beepbooptheory 5y agoA tingling feeling that this general argument will become very popular and determining in the future...
- TheCoelacanth 5y agoYes, and not only that, Elon Musk should be in prison for vehicular homicide. If a human chooses to speed and kills someone as a result, they are going to jail. Tesla has willfully chosen to violate traffic laws resulting in numerous deaths. Where is the accountability?
- rsj_hn 5y agoI'd normally disagree since most of these systems ask you to keep paying attention or keep your hands on the wheel and they make it clear that this is assistive technology and not a replacement for an alert, licensed, driver being ultimately in control. But Elon's statements, and calling it "fully self driving", is really asking for a lawsuit or legal trouble. It's incredibly irresponsible and reckless, and also is the one big negative on an otherwise pretty awesome car. I really wish we could divorce all the self-driving/big brother electronic stuff from electric cars, and make available a dumb electric car.
- TheCoelacanth 5y agoThe idea that a driver can anticipate when a self-driving car is going to fuck up and do anything to prevent it is bullshit and the charlatans pushing these cars know it. These cars need to be taken off the roads until they can safely drive unattended.
- rsj_hn 5y ago> The idea that a driver can anticipate when a self-driving car is going to fuck up and do anything to prevent it is bullshit and the charlatans pushing these cars know it. There is no factual basis for this claim. Cruise control and adaptive cruise control have been in use for a long time, require this type of attention, and are safe to use.
- supperburg 5y ago
- chrisfosterelli 5y ago> they shipped a feature which breaks traffic laws, which is a serious error in a company asking us to trust their judgement in a safety-critical system You're not wrong per se, but there is significantly more nuance with self-driving technologies than you're suggesting. A more famous example in the self-driving car world is the Pittsburgh left [0], where in Pittsburgh a driver turning left will often get conventional precedence over vehicles going through the intersection despite there being no explicit left turn light. This move is technically illegal, but when the self-driving cars didn't do this it drove traffic to a halt regularly and held up every intersection where the self-driving car was turning left. Eventually this had to be added to the software. Examples like these are why self-driving technologies are so hard to get 100% right, driving is a mix of intuition and rules. A significant amount of driving is doing what other drivers expect you to do. If the cars don't behave like human drivers expect, it often causes more problems than doing what the car is "supposed" to do. That said, as a pedestrian who has frequently almost been hit by people rolling stop signs, I'm with the NHTSA here... [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_left https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_left
- newsbinator 5y ago> Examples like these are why self-driving technologies are so hard to get 100% right, modern driving is a mix of intuition and rules. Indeed! The hardest part of switching to driverless cars overall is that driverless vehicles have to exist on the road for some number of years surrounded by ones driven by primates, with primate reflexes and a variety of ad-hoc behaviors. If every car on the road were to go driverless at midnight tonight, would the number of accidents and death and disability plummet compared to yesterday's stats?
- alistairSH 5y agoThere are better solutions to this problem than coding cars to behave like bad drivers. Round-a-bouts. Banning left turns during peak hours. Adding a dedicated left turn signal at the beginning of the cycle. The Pittsburg left is a terrible convention... It puts pedestrians at risk (assuming the cross-walk signal follows the traffic signal). And nobody from outside Pittsburg knows it's a thing - if I were visiting Pittsburg, I'd run into the car turning in front of me (well, hopefully not, but it's a risk).
- gmadsen 5y agoSometimes it is more dangerous to follow traffic laws exactly rather than normal human driver when you are surrounded by normal human drivers. It's not as simple as you are making it seem.
- acdha 5y agoHow many people are going to be hurt because someone stops at a stop sign?
- notch656a 5y agoMultiply the extra few seconds times how many ever millions of people end up using automated driving, times how many stop signs they end up at. The number of lifetimes lost due to stopping at stop signs has got to be the equivalent of the circa-100's area. The real question is why anyone bothers stopping at all if all directions are clear.
- iainmerrick 5y agoBikes and pedestrians? Although I understand a lot of cities don’t have those.
- notch656a 5y agoAnecdotally as a bicyclist it was infinitely easier to predict rolling stop drivers than those who stop. People stopped are rarely intelligent enough to follow the order of who's next, and constantly would randomly choose when to start up (sometimes just in time to almost hit me). the one rolling through I already know is going and I know the time is now that they're going, so little risk of accident. Biking isn't a game of who wants to kill you (all drivers) but rather _when_ they're going to attempt it.
- acdha 5y agoThis is a fallacy popular with bad drivers since it lets them rationalize their decision to put other people at risk. It's designed to shift the focus away from agency — note how the people most at risk aren't given a decision? — and it relies on an assumption which becomes monstrous as soon as you think about it. Trying to phrase it as a math problem with the implication that time is fungible makes it sound like a minor optimization but you really want to consider just how uneven the impact is: you're saving an amount of time so small you'll barely even remember it but the person you hit may be losing the rest of their life or spending the remainder of it significantly degraded. Around here, a lot of the people getting hit are kids so it's an especially unfavorable cost in years of quality life. The other unquestioned assumption is that this is even a serious time savings. In my experience, the average driver _massively_ overestimates how much time aggressive driving actually saves them. In most cases, all it means is that they're spending more time at the next backup — I've had people weaving around me for literally hours on the interstate without appearing to notice that they were doing a LOT more work failing to improve their relative position at all, and in the city I routinely see the same driver “passing” me on every block. Then, of course, if we're talking about lost time, how many years of quality life do people lose because they're deterred from healthier transportation options? It would take rather an awful lot of stop signs to cancel out the savings from even 5% of people switching from driving to bicycling, walking, or transit. > The real question is why anyone bothers stopping at all if all directions are clear. Because the most common excuse for hitting someone is “I didn't see them” or “They jumped in front of me!” (which in the vast majority of cases really means that the driver's attention was directed somewhere else). It's not like traffic engineers don't know yield signs exist: they use them because they're intentionally trying to prevent drivers from staying at a high speed due to the risk to pedestrians and cross traffic. Most people who live in neighborhoods which are popular with commuters have to spend years begging to get a stop sign, often requiring a serious collision to force the local DOT to act.
- SilasX 5y agoAhhhhh. I've struggled with this all my life, where the rules say one thing, but you're "just supposed to know" those cases where they aren't really serious about that. Now the contradiction is so painful, they'll have to address it. Either a) update the rules to reflect actual practice, or b) admit to "yes, your self-driving car has to obey traffic laws we don't enforce on humans".
- rocqua 5y agoIllegal actions and unsafe actions are not the same thing. Laws exist to make us safer, but they aren't perfect. I get why the law is enforced here. But I think cars doing full stops are more dangerous than cars doing rolling stops.
- sorokod 5y agoThe paragraph remains accurate but more funny if "rolling stop"* is replaced with "oxymoron", so "“Tesla Removes oxymoron from Assertive Driving Profile”. Tesla added oxymoron to make the car behave more human like. NHTSA said no, so Tesla removed the feature." * TIL: rolling stop
- alistairSH 5y agoWhen allowed to be, humans are terrible drivers. We shouldn't be designing our cars to behave like those bad drivers.
- elil17 5y agoThe idea that you’d add a feature that’s clearly illegal blows my mind. “Product poses legal risk to user” is a specific risk severity rating that mechanical engineers are trained to flag in school. Any other engineering company would have caught this in their DFMEA (Design Failure Modes and Effects Analysis). These sort of sloppy failures show that Tesla is far from a path to competing with major car companies on reliability.
- scoofy 5y agoThis is why i've been a fully self-driving skeptic in the last few years (initially was not), it's that our driving system is inherently broken. Fully rule-following will create unsafe situations merely because humans expect a certain amount of rule breaking. The person "at-fault" will be he human, but politically that will be tough when humans are mad at machine for "acting weird by following the rules." I fear that our inherent contradictions for rule-following in the road will make it impossible for ML, both to understand how to behave, and to behave predictably to humans. This is why I'm much more bullish on self-driving-similar vehicles, which look and behave differently, like how buses and trolleys behave differently in the road and we have different expectations from them.
- iainmerrick 5y agoI think the US has a particular problem here -- lots of bad traffic laws, and lots of bad drivers. IIRC road accident rates are relatively high in the US (some other countries are as high or higher, but not many) (edit to add: I guess the US is only high compared to most of Europe, Canada, Australia, NZ and parts of Asia. Which is a big fraction of the world, but not the whole world by any means.) I wonder whether other countries might fare better? Although the regulations will be really fragmented, and few countries can come close to the US as a market for new cars.
- scoofy 5y agoI really, really care about traffic and transit alternatives. The short answer is yes, the US has significantly higher death rates than europe (at least double last i checked), however, i think it's difficult to place that on their "driving behavior." I would speculate that much of it has to do with post-automobile city development. Having been on the road in many countries in europe, i can assure you that i've seen wildly unsafe driving in places like the UK and Italy, in contrast to germany/sweden/netherlands where i saw very safe driving. I presume the drastically lower fatality rates have much more to do with the road-widths and awkward intersections that prevent speed. I would need a ton of data to accept that "culture" is to blame for road deaths in a country, given the fact that most people treat driving as a background activity, while they are listening to music/podcasts/news/etc. I presume the vast majority of safety is done automatically by removing unsafe road designs that favor throughput, speed, and traffic reduction over forced safe usage of vehicles.
- dang 5y agoWe moved this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30168814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30168814 to the thread where it's on topic.
- MisterSandman 5y agoHow do you guys do this? It's it just copying a bunch of database fields from one database to another?
- dang 5y agoMore or less. But I built keyboard shortcuts into my moderation browser extension to make it easy.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]