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> Former NHTSA senior safety adviser Missy Cummings, a professor at George Mason University’s College of Engineering and Computing, said the surge in Tesla cras

> Former NHTSA senior safety adviser Missy Cummings, a professor at George Mason University’s College of Engineering and Computing, said the surge in Tesla crashes is troubling. > “Tesla is having more severe — and fatal — crashes than people in a normal data set,” she said in response to the figures analyzed by The Post. One likely cause, she said, is the expanded rollout over the past year and a half of Full Self-Driving, which brings driver-assistance to city and residential streets. “The fact that … anybody and everybody can have it. … Is it reasonable to expect that might be leading to increased accident rates? Sure, absolutely.” Absolutely terrifying that these beta tests are being conducted on public roads without everyone's consent.

oceanplexian 3y ago
> Absolutely terrifying that these beta tests are being conducted on public roads without everyone's consent. Tesla is by far not the worst offender. I rented a Kia EV6 and the lane keeping feature repeatedly tried to kill me within about 5 minutes of turning it on. I’ve had the same experience with plenty of other brand new vehicles. The only difference is Tesla’s implementation actually works so well that people stop paying attention to the road when they shouldn’t.
- jerkstate 3y ago
  Just an anecdote, but I test drove 3 different kinds of Tesla (S, 3, Y) and the EV6 as well, and I found the lane keeping/cruise control in the EV6 to be substantially better - I think the EV6 has more and/or higher def cameras, although the S I drove had HW4, it was soon after they were introduced and it's possible the software has not yet been optimized for them, and radars to detect cars which Tesla has removed. For some reason, the Teslas seem to lack object permanence, so cars around you will flicker in and out of existence, that doesn't seem to happen on the Kia. I also learned that Tesla actually has completely different code for the base-level TACC (traffic aware cruise control) versus the $15k Autopilot option. I assumed they were mostly the same with features turned off for TACC, but afaik they're completely different code.
wilg 3y ago
Worrying about it being a “beta” is nonsensical. It’s a hands-on driver-assistance system available to the general public and its safety should be evaluated thusly. The word “beta” is meaningless from a safety perspective and is essentially just advertising that the system’s ultimate goal is to be driverless. Also, we don’t use affirmative consent for vehicle regulations, because that’s silly. Instead, you are able to weigh in via the normal mechanism of a democracy.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- aaomidi 3y ago
  Something like this should be up for a referendum. We have seriously a lot more major and pressing problems. No one is picking and choosing representatives based on how they feel about beta testing software with the general public. Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if the NHTSA rightfully bans large scale operations of this software until overwhelming evidence of it being “safer than humans” have been given. This also includes fully disclosing the source and training material used to the NHTSA.
  - scotty79 3y ago
    > Something like this should be up for a referendum. That would only increase the cost of achieving agreement by necessitating the purchase of adverts before referendum. It was sold as miraculous. People bought into something they were told is miraculous. They would surely slso vote for the miraculous thing to be allowed.
- taskforcegemini 3y ago
  beta means it's not yet ready for production, and the question is why this beta grade software is being used in production (on street with real people vs only in development environments) where it time and time again hurts and kills people. there is numerous people on hn saying that driving assistance almost killed them but they reacted in time. I don't see if/how those instances could be reported, but obviosly the failure rates could therefore be a lot higher. high beam assistance should be an easy problem to solve compared to full self driving, yet I turn it off because it's not good enough/blinds oncoming traffic. imho there should be estrictions to only specific areas/roads for testing, or fsd cars should only be allowed at much lower speed limits.

oceanplexian 3y ago

> Absolutely terrifying that these beta tests are being conducted on public roads without everyone's consent. Tesla is by far not the worst offender. I rented a Kia EV6 and the lane keeping feature repeatedly tried to kill me within about 5 minutes of turning it on. I’ve had the same experience with plenty of other brand new vehicles. The only difference is Tesla’s implementation actually works so well that people stop paying attention to the road when they shouldn’t.

jerkstate 3y ago
Just an anecdote, but I test drove 3 different kinds of Tesla (S, 3, Y) and the EV6 as well, and I found the lane keeping/cruise control in the EV6 to be substantially better - I think the EV6 has more and/or higher def cameras, although the S I drove had HW4, it was soon after they were introduced and it's possible the software has not yet been optimized for them, and radars to detect cars which Tesla has removed. For some reason, the Teslas seem to lack object permanence, so cars around you will flicker in and out of existence, that doesn't seem to happen on the Kia. I also learned that Tesla actually has completely different code for the base-level TACC (traffic aware cruise control) versus the $15k Autopilot option. I assumed they were mostly the same with features turned off for TACC, but afaik they're completely different code.

wilg 3y ago

Worrying about it being a “beta” is nonsensical. It’s a hands-on driver-assistance system available to the general public and its safety should be evaluated thusly. The word “beta” is meaningless from a safety perspective and is essentially just advertising that the system’s ultimate goal is to be driverless. Also, we don’t use affirmative consent for vehicle regulations, because that’s silly. Instead, you are able to weigh in via the normal mechanism of a democracy.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aaomidi 3y ago
Something like this should be up for a referendum. We have seriously a lot more major and pressing problems. No one is picking and choosing representatives based on how they feel about beta testing software with the general public. Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if the NHTSA rightfully bans large scale operations of this software until overwhelming evidence of it being “safer than humans” have been given. This also includes fully disclosing the source and training material used to the NHTSA.
- scotty79 3y ago
  > Something like this should be up for a referendum. That would only increase the cost of achieving agreement by necessitating the purchase of adverts before referendum. It was sold as miraculous. People bought into something they were told is miraculous. They would surely slso vote for the miraculous thing to be allowed.
taskforcegemini 3y ago
beta means it's not yet ready for production, and the question is why this beta grade software is being used in production (on street with real people vs only in development environments) where it time and time again hurts and kills people. there is numerous people on hn saying that driving assistance almost killed them but they reacted in time. I don't see if/how those instances could be reported, but obviosly the failure rates could therefore be a lot higher. high beam assistance should be an easy problem to solve compared to full self driving, yet I turn it off because it's not good enough/blinds oncoming traffic. imho there should be estrictions to only specific areas/roads for testing, or fsd cars should only be allowed at much lower speed limits.