7 ms·

Teslas turning off autopilot seconds before a crash, apparently avoiding being recorded as active during an incident, is wild https://futurism.com/tesla-nhtsa-a

• iugtmkbdfil834 6mo ago
  I think this is part of the reason I am wary of trying it ( including some of the competitor's variants ). They all want you to pay attention, because you may be forced to make a decision out of the blue. I might as well be in control all the time and not try to course correct at the literal last second.
  • IgorPartola 6mo ago
    A self driving car should have no steering wheel. If it has a steering wheel it is a vote of no confidence from the manufacturer.
    • ghaff 6mo ago
      I don't really buy that. There are a lot of situations (e.g. being directed to park in a space at a fairgrounds, ski area, or whatever) that you can't reasonably expect AFAIK to be programmed into a car's computer. Even if a car can legitimately handle roads under most circumstances, they're not going to be able to handle everything.
      • catlikesshrimp 6mo ago
        "Because the Origin does not have manual controls, the NHTSA must issue an exception to the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards to permit operation on public roads" Too bad that project failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_(autonomous_vehicle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_(autonomous_vehicle)
      • butlike 6mo ago
        I think their point was "it's not ready yet."
    • grog454 6mo ago
      Throttle and yoke aren't a vote of no confidence from aircraft manufacturers. Some modes of operation are suitable for autopilot and some are not.
      • sobellian 6mo ago
        Would it be a vote of no confidence in Full Self Flying?
        • tclancy 6mo ago
          No, it would be an acknowledgement of the lack of perfection in human systems so far.
      • saalweachter 6mo ago
        I mean, they kinda are. Airline pilots aren't supposed to take a nap, and there are occasionally articles about the various things that have gone wrong because the pilots weren't paying attention.
      • NekkoDroid 6mo ago
        There is a reason that pilots get basically told the ins and outs of a specific plane. Imagine the outrage if people need to do month long training for a specific car just to be able to drive it (and not just a general "here is how cars roughly work and the laws of the road").
    • gambiting 6mo ago
      How do you reverse such a car into your own driveway that's positioned in a funny way at an angle and an incline? What if you're parking off road for any reason? Like, you have to be able to manoeuvre your own vehicle sometimes.
      • deleted 6mo ago
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    • singpolyma3 6mo ago
      Well we don't have any self driving cars outside of San Francisco. Only cars with advanced driver assistance.
      • lotsofpulp 6mo ago
        Quite a few more places have them now: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?hl=en https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?hl=en
        • jerlam 6mo ago
          Also in Vegas (Zoox), and China has their own competitive market of self-driving taxis.
    • tclancy 6mo ago
      That presents an interesting failure mode challenge.
  • pmarreck 6mo ago
    Interestingly, I think that similar types of arguments are made against "agentic coding" If you don't pay constant attention, you will never notice when it slips in a bug or security issue
    • ownagefool 6mo ago
      Sure, but you can do that in a diff after the event, rather than live.
    • catlikesshrimp 6mo ago
      Car crash deaths are better known than software bug caused deaths. Worse: a car crash can cause the driver's death; I wouldn't offload work on which my life depends to an experimental tech.
      • TheScaryOne 6mo ago
        Today's car crash deaths are sometimes software bug caused deaths. Toyota failed their forensic audit of their drive by wire code back in 2013. https://capitolweekly.net/toyota-has-settled-hundreds-of-sudden-acceleration-cases/ https://capitolweekly.net/toyota-has-settled-hundreds-of-sud...
  • x187463 6mo ago
    Treat it like a driver assistance system. I treat FSD the same as I treat Augmented Cruise Control and Lane Keep Assist in my CRV. I keep my hands on the steering wheel and follow along with the decision making.
    • grvdrm 6mo ago
      Reminds me of a situation not long ago. I’m in left lane on highway. Tesla ahead of me but quite a ways away. I realize as I’m driving that the Tesla is moving quite slow for the left lane driving. And before you say it, yes there are lots of people speeding in highway left lanes too. So - I passed on the right rather than tailgate. Look over and see a guy leaning back in his seat. No hands on wheel. Could’ve been asleep. And driving 10-15 mph slower than you’d expect in that lane. To your point about using it FSD the way you do, makes total sense to me. Which implies you would also cruise at the right speed depending on the lane you are in, unlike my example.
      • x187463 6mo ago
        One of my major complaints about FSD is the 'speed profiles'. You used to be able to set a target speed directly. Now, you can only select a profile. You're either going the exact speed limit, 2-3mph over, or essentially 'with the flow of traffic' which can lead to speeding +15 over the limit.
        • grvdrm 6mo ago
          Didn't know about that feature. Thanks for the illumination. On verge of going full electric and looking at BMW, Lucid, Porsche, Rivian, Tesla. I wonder what's taught to new drivers about this sort of situation. My intuitive feeling (driving for almost 30 years) is you drive with the flow of traffic when traffic is present. I don't see too many left lane drivers glued to speed limits, but it's obvious when someone is a fast or slow.
          • x187463 6mo ago
            It's worth noting that older Tesla's pre-2024, are stuck on an old version of FSD due to compute limitations. Recent FSD, generally, does not hang out in the left lane and is very good at recognizing when vehicles approach from the rear. It will move to the right lane to allow them to pass.
  • Symmetry 6mo ago
    SAE level 2 is just a bad idea. People can't be expected to carefully monitor a car and take over at a moment's notice when it's doing all the driving. My adaptive cruise control is great and I hope to have a future car where I can zone out while it drives and take over after after a few seconds heads up, but the zone between shouldn't be a valid feature.
    • JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
      I think you mean SAE Level 3. SAE Level 2 is “lane centering” and “adaptive cruise control” [1]. (Level 3 is “when the feature requests, you must drive.) [1] https://www.ncdd.com/images/blog/diagram.png https://www.ncdd.com/images/blog/diagram.png
      • Symmetry 6mo ago
        I meant to include both SAE 2 and 3. I think having both lane keeping and cruise control on at the same time will tend to cause people to lose focus in a way they wouldn't if they had to do one or the other.
    • dualvariable 6mo ago
      I don't even use cruise control. I like to be actively switched on all the time constantly making little decisions, including speed, so that I actually am instantly ready if I need to make some big decision. People these days letting the car drive, thinking they can spring into action I think are underestimating just how cold their cache lines are getting and the major page fault they're going to take when they try to take over. And I've seen comments by people that they were letting the car drive itself into a bad situation they could see developing, but didn't jump in to take over right away in anticipation (effectively betting on the car over their own skill but still realizing they had to jump in if the car got it wrong--which is just so incredibly confused).
• deleted 6mo ago
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• d1sxeyes 6mo ago
  To be fair, that report says > the self-driving feature had “aborted vehicle control less than one second prior to the first impact” It seems right to me that the self-driving feature aborts vehicle control as soon as it is in a situation it can’t resolve. If there’s evidence that Tesla is actively using this to “prove” that FSD is not behind a crash, I’m happy to change my mind. For me, probably 5s prior is a reasonable limit.
  • x187463 6mo ago
    This is reasonable, and you have to imagine many collisions involve the driver taking control at the last second causing the software to deactivate. That being said, this becomes a matter of defining a self-driving collision as one in which self-driving contributed materially to the event rather than requiring self-driving be activated at the exact moment of impact.
    • kombookcha 6mo ago
      Agreed. I also feel like there is a world of difference between the driver deliberately assuming control at the last second because they notice that an accident is about to happen, and the car itself yielding control unprompted because it thinks an accident is about to happen. The former is to be expected. The latter seems likely to potentially make an already dangerous situation worse by suddenly throwing the controls to an inattentive driver at a critical moment. It seems like it would be much safer for the autopilot to continue doing its best while sounding a loud alarm to make it clear that something dangerous is happening.
      • x187463 6mo ago
        > It seems like it would be much safer for the autopilot to continue doing its best while sounding a loud alarm to make it clear that something dangerous is happening. This is essentially what FSD does, today. When the system determines the driver needs to take over, it will sound an alert and display a take-over message without relinquishing control.
  • superxpro12 6mo ago
• Bluestrike2 6mo ago
  Disregarding the fact that NHTSA findings apparently contradict it (though that may just be a more recent change than the 2022 report), Tesla claims to use five seconds before a collision event as the threshold for their data reporting on their FSD marketing page: > If FSD (Supervised) was active at any point within five seconds leading up to a collision event, Tesla considers the collision to have occurred with FSD (Supervised) engaged for purposes of calculating collision rates for the Vehicle Safety Report. This approach accounts for the time required for drivers to recognize potential hazards and take manual control of the vehicle. This calculation ensures that our reported collision rates for FSD (Supervised) capture not only collisions that occur while the system is actively controlling the vehicle, but also scenarios where a driver may disengage the system or where the system aborts on its own shortly before impact.[0] In theory, that should more than cover the common perception-response times of around ~1 to 1.5 seconds used as a rule of thumb for most car accidents. But I'm quite curious what research has been done on the disengagement process as driver assistance systems return control to the driver and its impact on driver response times and their overall alertness. If drivers trust the car to handle braking and steering for you, are we really going to see perception–response times that low, or have we changed the behavior being measured? Instead of timing a direct response to a stimulus, we’re now including the time required to re-engage their attention (even if they're nominally "paying attention"), transition to full control of the vehicle, and then react to the stimulus that they're now barreling down on. For that matter, this approach is making the implicit assumption that pressing the brake pedal or turning the steering while is a sign of now-active control and awareness. Is it? Or could it just be a sort of instinctual reaction? I've been in the passenger seat when a driver has slammed on the brakes, only to find myself moving my right foot as if to hit an imaginary brake pedal even knowing I obviously wasn't the one driving. Hell, I remember my mom doing that back when I was learning to drive during normal braking. 0. https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety#:~:text=within https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety#:~:text=within five seconds
• plqbfbv 6mo ago
  It's well known for a while now, and it's not to avoid recording being active, it's to avoid a possibly damaged computer to keep working in a likely compromised situation. What happens if the car crashes and flips, AP/FSD has no training on that, and wheels keep spinning at full speed while first responders try to secure the car? AEB should still be working to pump the breaks AFAIK, but auto-steer and cruise control will be disabled while the computer and electronics are still perfectly operational to make the car more secure for the passengers and first responders after the event. EDIT: IIRC the threshold for disengagement is 1s.
  • palmotea 6mo ago
    >> Teslas turning off autopilot seconds before a crash, apparently avoiding being recorded as active during an incident, is wild https://futurism.com/tesla-nhtsa-autopilot-report https://futurism.com/tesla-nhtsa-autopilot-report > It's well known for a while now, and it's not to avoid recording being active, it's to avoid a possibly damaged computer to keep working in a likely compromised situation. What happens if the car crashes and flips, AP/FSD has no training on that, and wheels keep spinning at full speed while first responders try to secure the car? That sounds like an ass-covering justification. There may be a good reason for triggering some kind of interlock to prevent the problems you outlined, but if their implementation 1) also stopped recording seconds before a crash or 2) they publicly claimed it wasn't responsible since it turned itself off, then Tesla is behaving unethically and dishonestly.
    • plqbfbv 6mo ago
      I'm just stating what I remember, I'm not trying to defend Tesla. For 1) it's the first time I hear it from a technical point of view - Tesla's dashcam records continuously for the last 10m, and should save the data on the internal computer in case of a crash and send it back to Tesla if feasible AFAIR (I'm an owner). IIRC it's not the first case though where Tesla claimed the data wasn't available or corrupted, and then it was actually recovered some time later after pressure from authorities. So I think technically the data is there, but also believe Tesla is behaving unethically and dishonestly to cover up or delay retrieval. 2) I often hear it as FUD, as in: AP/FSD was off, the user just did it by accident, wasn't accustomed to it, or just didn't know how it worked. AFAIR most of the accidents had the data released and showed some of the following: user touched steering wheel and disengaged autosteer/FSD (whether knowingly or by accident), user was pressing accelerator pedal by accident, user was pressing accelerator instead of brake, etc etc