4 ms·

The CRV was stopped with hazards and lights off, at night, in the center lane of a 10 lane freeway. Certainly a human driver could have easily made this mistake

by mlsu 3y ago

The CRV was stopped with hazards and lights off, at night, in the center lane of a 10 lane freeway. Certainly a human driver could have easily made this mistake.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
And it was occluded by the driver in front, given "she was able to change lanes and avoid hitting the Honda." (Friendly reminder to always have safety triangles, e.g. [1], in your car.) [1] https://www.mcmaster.com/products/traffic-warning-triangles/ https://www.mcmaster.com/products/traffic-warning-triangles/
- alright2565 3y ago
  (but maybe don't try and deploy them when you're stopped in the middle of a 5-lane highway with your lights off)
  - cdchn 3y ago
    Darn if only there was some easy to reach button for the driver to deploy flashing lights to notify other drivers of the potential hazard.
dboreham 3y ago
Less so a machine with radar. Oh wait...
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
Perhaps true, though I suspect the public will demand higher safety than humans to feel comfortable with these on the roads, even if such fears could be irrational.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > I suspect the public will demand higher safety than humans to feel comfortable with these on the roads Hasn't this ship sailed? The people angry about self-driving cars aren't other drivers. They're people upset about displaced taxi jobs.
  - dghlsakjg 3y ago
    Not at all. I don’t care too much one way or the other for driving jobs, but I do care quite a bit about self driving car safety. They are being trained in an imperfect real world, and I don’t particularly want to find out if they ignore unmarked crosswalk laws (or other safety related stuff) as thoroughly as human drivers do. I’m not alone. I’ve talked to plenty of people that recognize that car infrastructure is inherently unsafe in many places, the last thing I want is an incentive to have more vehicles driving around because now you don’t need humans inside the car.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      Of course people care about safety. That doesn't translate to either public action nor public action requiring self-driving cars be safer than human-piloted ones. Look at every regulatory proceeding around self-driving cars, and the safety arguments are either drowned out by the jobs arguments or made principally by people motivated by job-loss concerns My gut feeling is we're perfectly happy with self-driving cars that are even substantially worse than human-piloted ones, so long as they crash the way humans do. Rear ending in the dark, okay. Barreling full speed into a highway divider [1] or dragging pedestrians to get out of traffic [2], not. [1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/theres-growing-evidence-teslas-autopilot-handles-lane-dividers-poorly/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/theres-growing-evidence... [2] https://abc7news.com/cruise-autonomous-cars-gm-recall-sf-robotaxi-software-update/14026840/ https://abc7news.com/cruise-autonomous-cars-gm-recall-sf-rob...
      - dghlsakjg 3y ago
        > My gut feeling is we're perfectly happy with self-driving cars that are even substantially worse than human-piloted ones, so long as they crash the way humans do. Rear ending in the dark, okay. Barreling full speed into a highway divider [1] or dragging pedestrians to get out of traffic [2], not. No. I’m very not ok with this. Many human drivers are terrible. Most collisions are entirely avoidable, and I certainly don’t want more of the same from computers. If I keep getting my life put at risk more often by incompetent driverless cars, I’m going to be pissed! Maybe people that spend their time in cars agree with you, but as a cyclist and pedestrian the common accident modes are the ones that pose the greatest risk to me. Pinball off the jersey barricades all you want, but stop passing bikes too close, and plowing through crosswalks just because you can get away with it. I’ve been hit twice on my bike, both times 100% the driver’s fault. The stakes are life and limb for me, so I absolutely do not accept a higher accident rate.
dotancohen 3y ago
Exactly. If this car crash is newsworthy, then that actually builds more trust in robotic driving.
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  i suppose it's good for bitcoin as well
jazzyjackson 3y ago
I've never really expected self driving cars to lower the rate of accidents simply because cars are dangerous whether or not you have the reaction time of a computer. Can it save the human in a moment of inattention? Absolutely, my prius has shouted at me to brake when I was messing with the radio, but it doesnt matter how good your radar is when you're flying around a blind turn or coming up behind an invisible, stopped object. (%50 reduction would be good, drunks taking robo taxis home is great, but IMO driving is easy and robots wont be better at it)
- al_borland 3y ago
  In an interview with Boston Dynamics, one of their robotics engineers said something like, “the hard stuff is easy and the easy stuff is hard.” There are things that humans can learn and do extremely quickly, or figure out on the fly, that robots require extensive training for.
  - usrusr 3y ago
    Stuff like checking the rear view mirror when slamming the brakes upon some surprise uncertainty, true. Humans will always be bad at this, but for a computer it's trivial to include the tail situation in the brake decision.
    - al_borland 3y ago
      I think the issue is that basic ACC doesn’t understand intent and the larger picture. If someone merges in and I have control, I can usually just let off the gas a little bit, as they will likely speed up, or move out of the lane shortly. Actual braking is almost never required. But the ACC just sees some slow moving object inches from the front of the car and flips out to try and get back to a good state.
  - FabHK 3y ago
    AKA Moravec's paradox. > Moravec wrote in 1988, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility". > Steven Pinker wrote in 1994 that "the main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox
zzzeek 3y ago
> Certainly a human driver could have easily made this mistake. except a human driver in front of the Mach-E did see the car and avoided it successfully. that's why cars with driver assist features are supposed to be using radar to detect obstacles. im not familiar with the Mach-E's feature here that's referred to as "handsfree". Usually these features are supposed to make sure the driver is still in control of steering at all times, like the Ioniq 5. I'm probably going to be a teeny bit more wary of Mach-Es on the road if they are using a not totally reliable radar detection system.
- modeless 3y ago
  Automotive radars often ignore stationary objects because they have trouble differentiating between a car parked in a lane vs. a car parked on the side of the road vs. an overhead metal road sign. If they didn't ignore stationary objects they would be slamming on the brakes in the middle of the freeway all the time.
- jibe 3y ago
  except a human driver in front of the Mach-E did see the car and avoided it successfully. That makes it harder for the car behind. The Mach-E is following a moving car, which is blocking the view of the stopped car. She swerves out of the way, and the situation goes from everything normal to disaster in half a second. A difficult situation for humans or autonomous system.
  - Free-is-Freedom 3y ago
    The Mach E just shouldn't have been following the way it was. Autonomous systems need to maximize their road information, not follow social trends (i.e. not follow closely on the highway at the sacrifice of visibility)
    - jibe 3y ago
      That can be true, while also being true that a moving car in front of you can better see an obstacle while obscuring it from the car behind. I’m just saying that the car in front that avoided it was in a different visibility situation to respond than the following car.
jeffbee 3y ago
But this paragraph from the report clearly states that at least one human did not. A human driver avoided the crash and a computer control system crashed.
- MBCook 3y ago
  It’s not unavoidable. But it’s a black car stopped without lights in the middle of a freeway at night. It’s just a matter of time if no one intervenes (e.g. cops with flashing lights drawing attention).
  - Free-is-Freedom 3y ago
    Ehh. I think it's actually 100% avoidable with a robust self driving solution. One with a smart enough margin of safety would never be in a situation where it has so little information that it initiates a crash on the highway
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  That's not a given. From the report: "According to the NTSB, a witness had come across the stopped CR-V prior to the collision and noted that neither its taillights or hazard lights were illuminated, She was able to change lanes and avoid hitting the Honda, but after she passed it, she saw the Mach-E strike the stopped crossover in her rearview mirror." That means the witness car likely obstructed the view of the stopped vehicle, then changed lanes at the last minute, revealing the stopped vehicle after it was too late for the Ford to stop.
darby_eight 3y ago
> Certainly a human driver could have easily made this mistake. Certainly a heavily inebriated driver might have made this mistake if the car were difficult to see at a distance, but otherwise... no, I don't see this happening at all.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  You lack imagination and/or driving experience; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis. that said, driving tired is not uncommon and just as bad if not worse than driving drunk.
  - caseyy 3y ago
    Thanks for sharing that. I've experienced this many times as I used to drive a lot at night. To me it was like half of my mind falling asleep while the other half followed the white line for hours. I used to drive close to 70k miles at night every year, all along the same routes, with no stimulation, just the white line. I know I wasn't asleep or tired, but it was like driving in a dream sometimes. It is probably much, much more common than we know, and I think this state would completely fool the attention-tracking systems in self-driving cars. What is worse, many people drive the same routes commercially every night, like sleeper coach drivers. I think if they even did so much as spoke about this, it could significantly harm their careers. So it's unlikely that this demographic that could be most affected will talk about it openly. But there is almost nothing you can do to prevent it. After a certain number of thousands of miles along the same route, seeing the same white line, for hours, in the dark, you zone out. Another thing that's making it worse is that I could only ever catch myself in this state when I already did something irresponsible. Like I'd go past a speed limit sign without reacting, and in a couple of seconds my brain would wake up to say "hey, something is happening, let's pay attention again". Otherwise, it's almost impossible to catch your mind drifting gently away. I'm happy to finally put a label to the experience.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- 3y ago
lostlogin 3y ago
> Certainly a human driver could have easily made this mistake. Yes, and we have clear rules and precedent for who is responsible. This scenario is rather more complicated.
- zip1234 3y ago
  Though such rules and precedent may be clear, they don't put any blame on road design or manufacturers of cars. Someone driving 150mph--it is the drivers fault even though the manufacturer knows that there is no road that this is possible.
  - bornfreddy 3y ago
    Nitpick: in Germany there are roads with no speed limit (it might still be imposed in case of "stau").
- MBCook 3y ago
  The owners manual clearly says you are still responsible and it can’t detect stopped vehicles. The system does its best to ensure you’re watching the road with cameras to track your gaze. Laws always tend to put the driver as the last stop in the chain responsible too. This is very unfortunate. There’s a good chance that CRV was going to be hit if the Mach E avoided it. But the person in the drivers seat is still the one responsible. I would love to know the stories of both the Ford and Honda drivers. Doubt the public will ever know.
cdchn 3y ago
The probability that someone would have eventually hit this CR-V is approaching 100%.
MBCook 3y ago
Well almost certainly never know but I’d love to know why the CRV was stopped there in that configuration. Why not turn on hazards? Had it been there long at all? Did the electrical system fail or something preventing the hazards/brake lights/etc?
- Free-is-Freedom 3y ago
  [flagged]

by mlsu 3y ago

The CRV was stopped with hazards and lights off, at night, in the center lane of a 10 lane freeway. Certainly a human driver could have easily made this mistake.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

And it was occluded by the driver in front, given "she was able to change lanes and avoid hitting the Honda." (Friendly reminder to always have safety triangles, e.g. [1], in your car.) [1] https://www.mcmaster.com/products/traffic-warning-triangles/ https://www.mcmaster.com/products/traffic-warning-triangles/

alright2565 3y ago
(but maybe don't try and deploy them when you're stopped in the middle of a 5-lane highway with your lights off)
- cdchn 3y ago
  Darn if only there was some easy to reach button for the driver to deploy flashing lights to notify other drivers of the potential hazard.

dboreham 3y ago

Less so a machine with radar. Oh wait...

TaylorAlexander 3y ago

Perhaps true, though I suspect the public will demand higher safety than humans to feel comfortable with these on the roads, even if such fears could be irrational.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> I suspect the public will demand higher safety than humans to feel comfortable with these on the roads Hasn't this ship sailed? The people angry about self-driving cars aren't other drivers. They're people upset about displaced taxi jobs.
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  Not at all. I don’t care too much one way or the other for driving jobs, but I do care quite a bit about self driving car safety. They are being trained in an imperfect real world, and I don’t particularly want to find out if they ignore unmarked crosswalk laws (or other safety related stuff) as thoroughly as human drivers do. I’m not alone. I’ve talked to plenty of people that recognize that car infrastructure is inherently unsafe in many places, the last thing I want is an incentive to have more vehicles driving around because now you don’t need humans inside the car.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    Of course people care about safety. That doesn't translate to either public action nor public action requiring self-driving cars be safer than human-piloted ones. Look at every regulatory proceeding around self-driving cars, and the safety arguments are either drowned out by the jobs arguments or made principally by people motivated by job-loss concerns My gut feeling is we're perfectly happy with self-driving cars that are even substantially worse than human-piloted ones, so long as they crash the way humans do. Rear ending in the dark, okay. Barreling full speed into a highway divider [1] or dragging pedestrians to get out of traffic [2], not. [1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/theres-growing-evidence-teslas-autopilot-handles-lane-dividers-poorly/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/theres-growing-evidence... [2] https://abc7news.com/cruise-autonomous-cars-gm-recall-sf-robotaxi-software-update/14026840/ https://abc7news.com/cruise-autonomous-cars-gm-recall-sf-rob...
    - dghlsakjg 3y ago
      > My gut feeling is we're perfectly happy with self-driving cars that are even substantially worse than human-piloted ones, so long as they crash the way humans do. Rear ending in the dark, okay. Barreling full speed into a highway divider [1] or dragging pedestrians to get out of traffic [2], not. No. I’m very not ok with this. Many human drivers are terrible. Most collisions are entirely avoidable, and I certainly don’t want more of the same from computers. If I keep getting my life put at risk more often by incompetent driverless cars, I’m going to be pissed! Maybe people that spend their time in cars agree with you, but as a cyclist and pedestrian the common accident modes are the ones that pose the greatest risk to me. Pinball off the jersey barricades all you want, but stop passing bikes too close, and plowing through crosswalks just because you can get away with it. I’ve been hit twice on my bike, both times 100% the driver’s fault. The stakes are life and limb for me, so I absolutely do not accept a higher accident rate.

dotancohen 3y ago

Exactly. If this car crash is newsworthy, then that actually builds more trust in robotic driving.

jazzyjackson 3y ago
i suppose it's good for bitcoin as well

jazzyjackson 3y ago

I've never really expected self driving cars to lower the rate of accidents simply because cars are dangerous whether or not you have the reaction time of a computer. Can it save the human in a moment of inattention? Absolutely, my prius has shouted at me to brake when I was messing with the radio, but it doesnt matter how good your radar is when you're flying around a blind turn or coming up behind an invisible, stopped object. (%50 reduction would be good, drunks taking robo taxis home is great, but IMO driving is easy and robots wont be better at it)

al_borland 3y ago
In an interview with Boston Dynamics, one of their robotics engineers said something like, “the hard stuff is easy and the easy stuff is hard.” There are things that humans can learn and do extremely quickly, or figure out on the fly, that robots require extensive training for.
- usrusr 3y ago
  Stuff like checking the rear view mirror when slamming the brakes upon some surprise uncertainty, true. Humans will always be bad at this, but for a computer it's trivial to include the tail situation in the brake decision.
  - al_borland 3y ago
    I think the issue is that basic ACC doesn’t understand intent and the larger picture. If someone merges in and I have control, I can usually just let off the gas a little bit, as they will likely speed up, or move out of the lane shortly. Actual braking is almost never required. But the ACC just sees some slow moving object inches from the front of the car and flips out to try and get back to a good state.
- FabHK 3y ago
  AKA Moravec's paradox. > Moravec wrote in 1988, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility". > Steven Pinker wrote in 1994 that "the main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox

zzzeek 3y ago

> Certainly a human driver could have easily made this mistake. except a human driver in front of the Mach-E did see the car and avoided it successfully. that's why cars with driver assist features are supposed to be using radar to detect obstacles. im not familiar with the Mach-E's feature here that's referred to as "handsfree". Usually these features are supposed to make sure the driver is still in control of steering at all times, like the Ioniq 5. I'm probably going to be a teeny bit more wary of Mach-Es on the road if they are using a not totally reliable radar detection system.

modeless 3y ago
Automotive radars often ignore stationary objects because they have trouble differentiating between a car parked in a lane vs. a car parked on the side of the road vs. an overhead metal road sign. If they didn't ignore stationary objects they would be slamming on the brakes in the middle of the freeway all the time.
jibe 3y ago
except a human driver in front of the Mach-E did see the car and avoided it successfully. That makes it harder for the car behind. The Mach-E is following a moving car, which is blocking the view of the stopped car. She swerves out of the way, and the situation goes from everything normal to disaster in half a second. A difficult situation for humans or autonomous system.
- Free-is-Freedom 3y ago
  The Mach E just shouldn't have been following the way it was. Autonomous systems need to maximize their road information, not follow social trends (i.e. not follow closely on the highway at the sacrifice of visibility)
  - jibe 3y ago
    That can be true, while also being true that a moving car in front of you can better see an obstacle while obscuring it from the car behind. I’m just saying that the car in front that avoided it was in a different visibility situation to respond than the following car.

jeffbee 3y ago

But this paragraph from the report clearly states that at least one human did not. A human driver avoided the crash and a computer control system crashed.

MBCook 3y ago
It’s not unavoidable. But it’s a black car stopped without lights in the middle of a freeway at night. It’s just a matter of time if no one intervenes (e.g. cops with flashing lights drawing attention).
- Free-is-Freedom 3y ago
  Ehh. I think it's actually 100% avoidable with a robust self driving solution. One with a smart enough margin of safety would never be in a situation where it has so little information that it initiates a crash on the highway
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
That's not a given. From the report: "According to the NTSB, a witness had come across the stopped CR-V prior to the collision and noted that neither its taillights or hazard lights were illuminated, She was able to change lanes and avoid hitting the Honda, but after she passed it, she saw the Mach-E strike the stopped crossover in her rearview mirror." That means the witness car likely obstructed the view of the stopped vehicle, then changed lanes at the last minute, revealing the stopped vehicle after it was too late for the Ford to stop.

darby_eight 3y ago

> Certainly a human driver could have easily made this mistake. Certainly a heavily inebriated driver might have made this mistake if the car were difficult to see at a distance, but otherwise... no, I don't see this happening at all.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
You lack imagination and/or driving experience; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis. that said, driving tired is not uncommon and just as bad if not worse than driving drunk.
- caseyy 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing that. I've experienced this many times as I used to drive a lot at night. To me it was like half of my mind falling asleep while the other half followed the white line for hours. I used to drive close to 70k miles at night every year, all along the same routes, with no stimulation, just the white line. I know I wasn't asleep or tired, but it was like driving in a dream sometimes. It is probably much, much more common than we know, and I think this state would completely fool the attention-tracking systems in self-driving cars. What is worse, many people drive the same routes commercially every night, like sleeper coach drivers. I think if they even did so much as spoke about this, it could significantly harm their careers. So it's unlikely that this demographic that could be most affected will talk about it openly. But there is almost nothing you can do to prevent it. After a certain number of thousands of miles along the same route, seeing the same white line, for hours, in the dark, you zone out. Another thing that's making it worse is that I could only ever catch myself in this state when I already did something irresponsible. Like I'd go past a speed limit sign without reacting, and in a couple of seconds my brain would wake up to say "hey, something is happening, let's pay attention again". Otherwise, it's almost impossible to catch your mind drifting gently away. I'm happy to finally put a label to the experience.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
3y ago

lostlogin 3y ago

> Certainly a human driver could have easily made this mistake. Yes, and we have clear rules and precedent for who is responsible. This scenario is rather more complicated.

zip1234 3y ago
Though such rules and precedent may be clear, they don't put any blame on road design or manufacturers of cars. Someone driving 150mph--it is the drivers fault even though the manufacturer knows that there is no road that this is possible.
- bornfreddy 3y ago
  Nitpick: in Germany there are roads with no speed limit (it might still be imposed in case of "stau").
MBCook 3y ago
The owners manual clearly says you are still responsible and it can’t detect stopped vehicles. The system does its best to ensure you’re watching the road with cameras to track your gaze. Laws always tend to put the driver as the last stop in the chain responsible too. This is very unfortunate. There’s a good chance that CRV was going to be hit if the Mach E avoided it. But the person in the drivers seat is still the one responsible. I would love to know the stories of both the Ford and Honda drivers. Doubt the public will ever know.

cdchn 3y ago

The probability that someone would have eventually hit this CR-V is approaching 100%.

MBCook 3y ago

Well almost certainly never know but I’d love to know why the CRV was stopped there in that configuration. Why not turn on hazards? Had it been there long at all? Did the electrical system fail or something preventing the hazards/brake lights/etc?

Free-is-Freedom 3y ago
[flagged]