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DVD Player Found In Tesla Autopilot Crash, Says Florida Officials (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A digital video disc player was found in the Tesla car that was on autopilot when its driver was killed in a collision with a truck in May, Florida Highway Patrol officials said on Friday. "There was a portable DVD player in the vehicle," said Sergeant Kim Montes of the FHP in a telephone interview. She said there was no camera found, mounted on the dash or of any kind, in the wreckage. A lawyer for a truck driver involved in the accident with the Tesla told Reuters his investigators had spoken to a witness who said the DVD player was playing a "Harry Potter" video after the accident, but the lawyer was unable to verify that beyond the witness account. Lawyers for the family of the victim, 40-year-old Joshua Brown, released a statement Friday saying the family is cooperating with the investigations "and hopes that information learned from this tragedy will trigger further innovation which enhances the safety of everyone on the roadways." Lawyers for the family of the victim, 40-year-old Joshua Brown, released a statement Friday saying the family is cooperating with the investigations "and hopes that information learned from this tragedy will trigger further innovation which enhances the safety of everyone on the roadways." Tesla said in a statement Friday, "Autopilot is by far the most advanced driver assistance system on the road, but it does not turn a Tesla into an autonomous vehicle and does not allow the driver to abdicate responsibility."
"by far the most advanced driver assistance system on the road" but can't detect an enormous fucking truck right in front of the car.
Good to see Musk + Tesla in full bullshit mode straight out of the gate as usual...
What exactly is the point of it? To lull you into a false sense of comfort and security? I look forward to autonomous vehicles, but if it still requires me to keep my attention on the road and ready to respond, I'd rather just be in control of the vehicle to begin with.
Elon Musk's Terminators have claimed their first victim.
Tesla says their car had trouble differentiating the white truck trailer from the bright sky. So it sounds like they're just using a fairly low-tech contrast-based method of detecting vehicles in the car's proximity. Given what you're paying for a Tesla, I'd expect better sensors in their vehicles.
I assume Google's doing something more advanced...
Tesla's comments about the crash also seem predictably dick-ish.
#DeleteChrome
for 'screen time' while driving. you can't do it. period. texting and shit might be legal in some areas (that is changing, as it should), but watching a fucking tv? nope. don't know of anywhere in the u.s. you can do that. and the cherry on top: a 40 fucking year old was watching harry potter, for fucks sake.. *while driving* it is safe to say darwin had his eyes on this target for awhile. did he think his car was magic or something?
The problem is that if it slightly resembles a full-on AI based driverless system, that's how people are going to treat it no matter how many layweresque warnings you thrust in front of them and no matter how many forms they have to sign telling them it is just fancy lane assist.
It's just human nature: if people aren't actively involved in the driving process, their attention is going to wander. It's how we as humans are wired up. For a long trip, I'm not sure I could stay focused at all times, even though I'd know perfectly well I was risking my life if my attention wandered. If I'm driving, that's one thing, but if the car is doing 99.9% of it, the other 0.1% is going to pose a real serious problem.
If you build "almost an autopilot", that is a recipe for people treating it like what it resembles but isn't.
The car was basically equipped with a stay-in-lane and slow-down-if-you-approach-the-car-in-front-of-you kind of system, which is not an autonomous vehicle, nor can you take your eyes off the road. At best it reacts a bit faster if someone in front of you hits the brakes. Google did a talk on this and said in their tests, as soon as a car seems to be working by itself, drivers stopped paying attention to the road, so half-way-autonomous is a bad idea. People don't want to pay attention and they won't if the car seems to be doing a good enough job.
Only a fully autonomous car will be good enough.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Porn. Absolutely porn. No 40 year old man is driving down the road in his bad ass Tesla watching Harry Potter. No way, not happening. Porn.
Beware of the Leopard.
That is what this is. Until software companies are held accountable for their crimes, they'll never improve. Just look at Microsoft.
Although in this particular case it is unclear whether the driver was actually watching a DVD at the moment of the crash, it is pretty obvious that an assisted driving technology that can handle 95% of the driving situations will make users confident enough to be distracted when operating the vehicle, no matter how many warnings and disclaimers are shown telling users they need to pay attention all the time in case they have to gain control to handle the remaining 5% of the traffic situations. This is clearly explained in this TED talk by the head of Google driverless car program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (this particular issue is discussed around 4:10, although the whole video is worth watching). This is why Google approach to self driving cars is to release their product when the system is able to handle 100% of the driving situations and never require the user to take control in contrast to the Tesla approach of releasing a system than can handle most situations and make incremental improvements over time.
Exactly, take work off the human brain. The mind can wander, while the eyes are looking forward.
It is a case where a driver of a car
at speed was not aware of the road directly ahead of them, that makes this border on a darwin here folks..
Not necessarily. Maybe the rest of the automation had been so good that the driver saw the struck, but believed the car also saw the truck. If you are a passenger in a car, you don't pull the handbrake to avoid an accident when you expect the driver is going to press the foot brake.
That said, he was probably just watching Harry Potter.
Real lawyers write in C++
As far as I can see the truck driver was at fault, so why is such a big deal being made about this? Of course automation is going to make drivers lose concentration. Thats been understood for decades.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It fucking repeats itself. Fuck's sake man, if you guys don't read it why do you expect your readers to?
Lawyers for the family of the victim, 40-year-old Joshua Brown, released a statement Friday saying the family is cooperating with the investigations "and hopes that information learned from this tragedy will trigger further innovation which enhances the safety of everyone on the roadways." Lawyers for the family of the victim, 40-year-old Joshua Brown, released a statement Friday saying the family is cooperating with the investigations "and hopes that information learned from this tragedy will trigger further innovation which enhances the safety of everyone on the roadways."
Apparently a lawyer for the family has mental defect that causes them to repeat statements. Either that or the /. editors are once again showing their true dedication and attention to detail. Either way things that were getting better following the most recent change of hands have begun to erode already.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Havent we beat this fucking dead horse enough
Or maybe a guide on building homeless shelters. ;)
"Autopilot is by far the most advanced driver assistance system on the road, but it does not turn a Tesla into an autonomous vehicle and does not allow the driver to abdicate responsibility."
Then maybe they should start by stopping to use the misleading name of "autopilot" for this functionality.
likely that a black box video recorder will be mandatory after this.
I thought that high-end consumer vehicles employed Lidar to detect physical objects in front of them?
And isn't it a requirement of Tesla to have the cameras installed before you install the autopilot software?
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
So Tesla says the auto-pilot actually detected the trailer, but thought it was an "overhead sign" that was hanging high enough. What?! So it appears the sensors on Tesla are not precise enough to tell if the car can safely pass under something if it hangs over the road? I mean, come on, I'd be fine if the auto-pilot couldn't tell if the clearance is 10 feet or 12 feet. But a trailer? As far as I can find the standard floor height of a tractor trailer is 48". That means the clearance under is even less. It didn't occur to Tesla to test if the car can detect solid object hanging 4 feet off the ground?? I don't care if the driver was asleep, Tesla should have handled this.
Also, didn't we already have a Tesla hit a trailer in "auto-park" mode a few weeks ago?
What I know for damn sure is that next time I'm test driving a Tesla, or any other car with auto-pilot mode, I'm bringing a two by six with me.
The other main difference is that Tesla has logged data from 50 million miles of autopilot data from all over the world, while Google has logged data from 1.5 million miles mainly in the Bay area.
I think this gap will widen exponentially, and good enough AI for driving will come only through masses of data, so Tesla have a huge advantage.
What they SHOULD say is "of course our autopilot system is supposed to be able to detect that a truck has turned in front of you, we don't know why the system failed but we will put every effort into improving it so that nothing like this ever happens again.
Instead of trying to find ways to blame the driver and pretend that autopilot means no one will never take their eyes off the road they should say "mea culpa - our system failed, we take responsibility and we will fix it - and we will pay damages"
What is more important to deal with autopilot the way it will be used in the real world and protect public trust or to protect themselves from ONE count them ONE little lawsuit
They're idiots. They will not sell more cars. They don't deserve to.
I do not understand. Why would you think they do in the first place? Perfect SF movie artificial intelligence has not been invented and installed in a car. Are you being serious?
A person died for the novelty of a car that seemed to drive itself.
Who will be next.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I am a bit surprised about the belief that AIs (or machine learning) will solve all problems given enough data.
What do you think a neural net would have learned to do if trained to use VW's "AdBlue" as efficiently as possible but still to pass the NHTSA conformance test?
Who would you blame then? After all the constraints look reasonable. Would you want to be the engineer sued because he did not predict the neural net might learn something illegal?
Plus, there is obviously a problem with the way Tesla gathers its training data. If Elon Musk promotes a dashcam video taken by the killed driver earlier where the driver admits insufficient attention to the road (the cutting-in vehicle was in front of the driver and clearly visible), people might well take this as encouragement to not pay attention.
What was he watching - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Darwin Awards?
130 million miles have been logged by drivers using AP. This is the first fatality and there have been zero injuries up to this point. In addition, a number of accidents have been avoided.
So, how does this compare to the average?
In America, somebody dies every 96 million miles. In addition, there are a large number of injuries, though to be fair, injuries should probably not be looked at as much as accident rate (tesla is the safest car on the road, bar none; they make volvo look dangerous). So, at this point, we can say that there is 50% FEWER fatalities. Considering that NHTSA is investigating, I am sure that they will compare the accident rates on this and will likely find that it is much less using tesla AP, compared to the average driver.
So, yeah, I expect NHTSA will likely come up with suggestions of changes, but will allow AP to continue since the system has already proven that it is safer than the average driver.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The witness says a Harry Potter movie was playing. If he was making this up, then there's a less than one in a thousand chance that the DVD player actually contains a disc with a Harry Potter movie. (The last disc of the series was released on DVD in 2011. A Tesla owner would be much more likely to be watching a more recent release.)
Investigators know which disc was in the player, so they know if the witness is telling the truth.
I've said it before and I'll say it again.
Any system designed to detect and respond to vehicles or objects in your path MUST BE ABLE TO DETECT ALL SOLID OBJECTS DIRECTLY IN THE PATH OF ANY PART OF THE CAR, period! To do otherwise is irresponsible, dangerous, and just plain stupid! There have been multiple "accidents" like this already, luckily none had been fatal until this one, but there will be more to come unless Tesla (or, more likely the NTSB, since Tesla is all about denying and covering up flaws and blaming the victims at this point) puts an end to it.
If you're too fricking cheap to put another sensor on the roof, or too focused on "design" to allow it because you think it won't be pretty enough, you are WRONG!
This system should never have existed and I'll be happy when (not if) it gets permanently disabled until the car has the necessary sensors to actually do what it pretends to be able to do. I hope it happens sooner rather than later.
You know, a country with money's a little like a mule with a spinning wheel. No one knows how he got it and danged if it knows how to use it .
Heh-heh, mule.
The name's Musk, Elon Musk. And I come before you good people tonight with an idea. Probably the greatest—Aw, it's not for you. It's more of a China idea.
Now, wait just a minute. We're twice as smart as the people of China. Just tell us your idea and we'll give you subsidies for it.
All right. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll show you my idea. I give you the Tesla Autopilotl!
I've sold autopilots to Plymouth, Oldsmobile, and Studebaker, and by gum, it put them on the map!
Well, sir, there's nothin' on earth like a genuine bona-fide electrified one-car autopilot! What'd I say?
Autopilot!
What's it called?
Autopilot.
That's right! Autopilot!
Autopilot, autopilot, autopilot, autopilot, autopilot...
I hear those things are awfully new.
It's user tested, but not by you.
Is there a chance the car could crash?
It's not your life, so splash the cash.
First adopters must be brave...
They'll be given early graves.
Will this venture fund new green jobs?
No, good sir, I'm the new Steve Jobs.
We've killed off our whole space program.
Fund my SpaceX, my good man.
I swear, it's the country's only choice! Log in to PayPal and raise your voice!
Autopilot
What's it called?
Autopilot
AUTOPILOT!
But the economy's still all fucked and broken.
Subsidies, this man has stolen!
Autopilot
Autopilot
Autopilot!
Autopilot!!!
Auto...*CRASH*
I am a bit surprised about the belief that AIs (or machine learning) will solve all problems given enough data.
I'm surprised at your surprise. As a consultant I see a ton of demand for "big data" specialists. Companies eager to tap into every database and put sensors everywhere, to optimize or automate or whatever. Many of these projects fail in the end. Because big data is not about gathering, storing or querying the data, that problem has been more or less solved. It is about making sense of the data. Many still believe that simply having the data available in a handy dandy graphing tool will somehow magically provide them with useful insights.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Being a "victim" implies a tort or a criminal act. I fail to see how his death was either when he was the one not driving his car and instead watching a damn movie.
Why is a 40 year old watching Harry Potter anyway?
Tesla have zero miles of true auto-pilot data. It is illegal to use such vehicles on the road with the exception of a few small areas for testing. Tesla have data of driver assisted AI. That's a massive difference. Tesla are a PR company, and will spin their product to perfection regardless of reality. Suckers lap it up. Today we're talking about one dullard that believed the bullshit PR, and now he's dead. Darwin's Law candidate 27 for 2016.
The guy goes and buys one of the most technologically advanced cars on the market today and he watches movies on a portable DVD player? I thought those players were extinct.
Clicked on the bait, just to see what movie was being watched. Stopped reading article once known. Person deserves to die for poor movie selection. Goodbye.
"does not allow the driver to abdicate responsibility"
Perhaps you shouldn't have called it Autopilot then... but I suppose "fancy cruise control" doesn't sell cars.
It's not only about pushing a non-existing brake.
You also have an inborn reflex to brace for impact. A kid see the big thing in front, and a kid know automatically to hold on thing.
Which, while growing up, have also adapted to brace for the incoming quick braking.A growing kid/teen see the big thing in front and know to hold on things, because the braking will send thing flying around.
MAIN POINT: You'll see the behaviour even in non-driving individuals
("non drivers" might sound bizarre to the average USian, but assure you that on the other side of the atlantic pond, we have plenty of them in continental europe where the public transportation is good enough).
Then once you start learning to drive, you built the instinct to throw your right foot on the braking pedal to save your life
(if the anti-collision system of the car isn't already doing that for you).
So the sore braking foot is a combination of all of the above:
- you wanting to break inconsciously.
- but also your instinct trying to save you from imminent impact/avoid flying around on braking.
it just that, by now, due to the previous mechanism you tend to preferably throw forward your braking foot.
(instead of say, holding both feet while grasping the hand grab)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I got a ride with a coworker of mine once. He just got a junior IT position, recently graduated high school, was 18, and had a live in girl-friend in their new apartment (but she couldn't drive and didn't work?). He was really cocky, and was easily set off in anger if anyone pointed out any mistakes he made on any of his projects (I found this out later).
Anyways, we all went out to lunch one day, and he offered to drive.
Sure I thought. (BIG mistake!)
We weren't going far, but the whole time he was actually watching a family guy episode, instead of actually driving.
He had his car radio replaced with a car radio\pop out DVD player combo. So he'd play a dvd and watch it from the dash board.
I mentioned that I'd feel most comfortable if kept his eyes on the road, which he ignored, and said he watches dvd's while driving all the time...
A month later he got his license revoked (for a DUI).
He was confused as to where platform 9 3/4 was.
Absolutely, and part of that problem is terminology.
They never have "the data", they have a set of samples collected through methods which are often disparate. Temperature recorded by the points we have sensors at, for example, is not the same as "average temperature for the state we've put the sensor in" although people treat it that way.
Hmmm. I think that systems like the Subaru Eyesight system would have had no problem preventing ta crash like this.
http://drive.subaru.com/win14-...
At the end of the day the system (and humans for that matter) can only avoid an accident that is avoidable, if (for example) a car runs a red light at 100mph a fatal accident is inevitable. It will be interesting to see what telemetry they get out of the Tesla.
mated with a BMW's V8. Autopilot not needed.
What they SHOULD say is "of course our autopilot system is supposed to be able to detect that a truck has turned in front of you, we don't know why the system failed but we will put every effort into improving it so that nothing like this ever happens again.
So you think they should admit that their system failed, and is not suitable for the design purpose? That would be staggeringly stupid.
Instead of trying to find ways to blame the driver and pretend that autopilot means no one will never take their eyes off the road they should say "mea culpa - our system failed, we take responsibility and we will fix it - and we will pay damages"
Well, it's clear why you're not running anything. Tesla would be out of business in a hot second if you were at the helm.
What is more important to deal with autopilot the way it will be used in the real world and protect public trust or to protect themselves from ONE count them ONE little lawsuit
That's not how the law works. If they admit fault here, then every other lawsuit will proceed on that basis.
They're idiots. They will not sell more cars. They don't deserve to.
You're an idiot. No one will read your slashdot comments. You don't deserve it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I consider this a tesla / Musk fail. The concept of pushing the edges of spacex, to land, and reuse a rocket is amazing and commendable. Musk is pushing the edges, and it looks like he's going to succeed. I think that is so amazing and cool. Blowing up a few rockets - on an unmanned barge - is exactly right.
However.
His other company , tesla, cannot afford to 'beta' these features. Replace that truck with a (white) school bus and run the scenario again. Now we stop nyucking about porn vs harry potter, or auto pilot vs driver idiocy, and start thinking that it's really, really wrong to beta when lives are in play. Maybe there's a way (retinal scans ?) to ensure that the driver keeps paying attention ? But the minute you put untried tech out there and give the driver the sense that they can become a passenger, we'll start seeing a lot more of these examples. In this case, I don't believe that tesla should be held liable for driver stupidity. But they are responsible for being enablers of owner stupidity.
My sense is that airbus, with all the regulations, and all the inspections and knowledge, could teach us something about what happens when auto pilot breaks (air france, air asia). The person sitting behind the wheel has to move really quickly from someone who's sitting back and watching the plane fly itself, to being an actual pilot. In both of those cases, the pilots became all too accustomed to a plane that flew itself and those pilots killed 100's when they were asked to actually fly, and couldn't.
I think the technology is not perfect. But the driver is to blame for relying to heavily on it for navigation and control. So much so, it appears he was watching a video and not paying attention. In the end, will this technology create zombie drivers who think they car can just handle everything? Is this safer, or just a false sense of safety? How many people will over estimate the abilities of this technology and needlessly get hurt or killed? We have auto pilots on aircraft too, but still require a pilot and most likely a co- pilot. Unfortunately this driver sealed his fate by relying too much on a new technology that maybe gave the impression it was good enough to not need human input. Maybe that was Tesla's fault for possible implying this technology is that good. I guess it's not.
Did the driver have a medical emergency such that his hands remained on the wheel but he was incapable of reacting to events? The driver could have been incapacitated minutes before the crash. He may have already been clinically dead from a heart attack when the crash happened. If the car did not have the computer assisted driving capability, it may well have stopped miles before the crash, maybe in a ditch, probably at a much lower speed as the driver's foot would probably come off the accelerator.
No matter how good the collision avoidance system, these self-driving cars need a better deadman switch than simply whether a hand is on the steering wheel. Some trains have deadman switches where the train's driver has to deliberately hold a spring loaded lever forward or the train begins braking.
But of course implementing anything that would actually be effective would cause potential buyers to recognize more of the dangers inherent in self-driving cars, and that would have a negative impact on sales.
Candidate for Darwin award for those who swallow AI hype hook, line, and sinker. Note: sinker no longer contains lead.
What I haven't seen is any report from the SHP that indicates whether the truck was making a LEGAL left-hand turn across traffic? Or was he like many a big rig driver forcing his way traffic because. well, he is BIGGER and everybody else should yield to them.
"Autopilot is by far the most advanced driver assistance system on the road, but it does not turn a Tesla into an autonomous vehicle and does not allow the driver to abdicate responsibility."
I see Musk is getting a clue that slapping some proximity sensors on a car without a proper 3D radar and any chance of things like road surface detection, adding extra hype to the mix, and selling as coolest whee-zee "autopilot" in the world isn't that cool as it seemed. That is after somebody died even it was told it will happen by many people. Now the question is how many deaths it will take for this genius to realize that other automakers and OEM developers FORCE driver to stay engaged with hands on wheel with their own driver-assistance system, and do not allow any "autonomous driving" Russian roulette without proper hardware and AI for it.
And this comparison to average 11 years clunker on the US with worse crumple zones and no auto-brake features is so lame. You would expect better from new $100k car.
First off, it seems to me that driving on an experimental 'autpilot' in a roadway that has intersections (as is shown in the police report figure in: ( http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07... ) is tremendously more dangerous than using it on an interstate. That, and the reported presence of a dvd player causes one to question the drivers decision making.
But a greater concern, at least for me, is that the truck appears to have turned right in front of the Tesla. One possibility there is that the intersection had traffic lights, whose detection was missed by both driver and computer, which if true, is a bigger concern than missing the side of a white truck on a bright background. The other is that the truck did not yield to the oncoming car when making its turn, that is the truck cut off the tesla in the intersection. Apart from the liability issues raised, that circumstance is much more difficult to react to, either in person or by computer.
Any one have any further info?
We've all used portable DVD players. How many of them would keep playing a DVD after being hit? I expect the disc would fly out of the ones I've used. It is far more likely that the truck driver has lied.
Musk may have a problem here. I wonder in all this analysis if anybody considered the possibility that the driver saw the truck and assumed the car's autopilot would deal with it, and went back to watching his DVD? Even if the Tesla's autopilot recognized that the situation was beyond its scope, would giving control back to the driver have averted the fatality? The answer is quite probably no.
In any wrongful death suit that the driver's family brings against Tesla Motors, what is going to be on trial is not the autopilot technology, but whether or not its capabilities were accurately represented to the public. The fact that a DVD player with content actively queued up was found in the wreckage would support the idea that the driver -- at a minimum -- believed that the autopilot could handle whatever came along. Even if they successfully argue that Tesla Motors created no such expectation with their marketing materials, Musk's lawyers are still going to have to show that the autopilot could successfully transition control back to the driver in time to prevent the fatality. That is where I think Elon is in big trouble, because that particular problem, called the handoff problem, has not been solved, and probably can't be solved, according to anybody involved with autonomous vehicles (just google "driverless car handoff problem.")
If I were on Musk's defense team, I'd be pushing for an out-of-court settlement at this point. The handoff problem is exactly why Google will not go into the business of autonomous vehicles until federal regulations are rewritten so that Google can deploy vehicles on public roads with no human in the loop, period.
The other main difference is that Tesla has logged data from 50 million miles of autopilot data from all over the world, while Google has logged data from 1.5 million miles mainly in the Bay area.
I think this gap will widen exponentially, and good enough AI for driving will come only through masses of data, so Tesla have a huge advantage.
This is dumb fanboy argument that we hear again and again. Tesla didn't recorded anything. They don't have any hardware that would provided the data, i.e. laser radar system. They don't have enough connection bandwidth to transfer the data in real time. For autonomous driving, their system is dead (sometimes literaly) end from yesterday that will be replaced soon with better systems that will provide more advanced data anyway. You can't teach a pig to fly no matter how many million miles you will run with it.
"...the victim, 40-year-old Joshua Brown" , should have taken the train.
There are just too many variables involved in safe driving to allow a machine to take over. These don't know what they don't know.
Imagine home burglar alarm that just would electrocute any intruder. Nothing can go wrong here?
The same holds true for many automated systems, like nuclear power plants that do not have a tsunami/earthquake escape routine.
Can a drivers licensed be legally issued to a driver-less car?
Where is Harry Potters magic wand when you really need it? Average age of the Tesla engineering staff?
Do you really think at a certain point data will have every single possible scenario? There will always be edge cases that may make AI too dangerous to use ever.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Tesla didn't recorded anything. They don't have any hardware that would provided the data, i.e. laser radar system. They don't have enough connection bandwidth to transfer the data in real time. For autonomous driving, their system is dead (sometimes literaly) end from yesterday that will be replaced soon with better systems that will provide more advanced data anyway. You can't teach a pig to fly no matter how many million miles you will run with it.
It seems like for every incident they do somehow get detailed logs of what their sensors recorded. Sure it's not realtime, and sure it's not cases where the system performed fine. It feels like a variation of what ESR said -- "given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow". In this case Tesla is getting a load of real-world "bug reports" about their software.
You seem to be arguing that historical sensor reading data for a system with "X" sensors (and software developed for it) will be irrelevant for a system with "X+Y" sensors. That's a plausible assertion, although I'd bet against it.
Do you really think at a certain point data will have every single possible scenario? There will always be edge cases that may make AI too dangerous to use ever.
Oh no! I just think they'll gather edge scenarios at 50x the rate at which Google gathers them.
Oh my gosh. Let me get this straight. There was a car accident and someone was killed? That is unacceptable. We need to ban cars now! Come on people. Unfortunately, people die in car accidents every day. Over 30,000 of them a year. And yes, this even includes people who manually drive under tractor trailers. With a current sample size of one, it appears the Tesla fatality rate is pretty close to the average. I suspect after a few more data points are logged, it'll be less than the average. Teslas are going to have accidents, just like any other car. And some people are going to die in them. No other car is held to a standard of zero fatalities. I suspect overall, the Tesla is going to help to drive down the average and be one of the safest cars on the road.
I just looked at the Tesla Marketing efforts in regards to "Auto Pilot" and they make it sound as though it's a full fledged Autonomous System. This is going to bite them in the ass and balls because Marketing Screwed up and made Telsa potentially liable for this accident.
QUEERY: Does anyone know of a true Autonomous Vehicle on the roads?
What this accident has done is pushed self-driving cars back at least 20 years and with the DOT/NHTSA being involved in the investigation, we'll see far stricter regulations appear in regards to these features.
I'll leave this here - https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/04/28/1524230/volvo-engineer-calls-out-tesla-for-dangerous-wannabe-autopilot-system/
These are not some abstract sensors but very specific ones made by known OEM with specific set of data that they can and can't provide. In particular they can't provide 3D map with coordinates of all objects and road surfaces that are not level. :/
Some experience from gathering primitive data like speed/latitude/longitude may be useful long term, but it is usefulness is the same as taking crash PHP programming courses at local technical college expecting to become 3D modeling and AI expert
As of 2016 you can buy a car from pretty much any manufacturer without cruise control.
Oh, or even air conditioning, if you so wish.
Perhaps he was more confident of the car's collision avoidance system than he should have been. He was *too loyal* a customer.
It's worth noting that Tesla's main feature is being an e-car. The self-driving features are something separate.
(||) Nehmo (||)
Someone was going to be the first, and there are bound to be many more. But the good thing about automated driving tech, is that every time it happens engineers can go back to the lab and figure out how to prevent that situation from happening in the future. And thus little by little (but in rather short order by comparison to the age of the automobile) automated cars will take over the roads.
:T:R:A:N:S:
The U.S. needs to catch up to other parts of the world in regards to tractor trailer safety. http://www.treehugger.com/cars... Hopefully mandatory side rails is one of the NHTSAâ(TM)s recommendations. We need to do as much as possible to prevent accidents but also as much as possible to mitigate the severity of accidents.
Where a man-child of 40 years old uses autopilot so he can watch Harry Potter!
That's what happens when you give autistic children too much money I suppose.
I agree that "autopilot" is a misnomer, that the title should be chaned to something lik Safety Assist... that makes it clear that what this Tesla model has onliy assists the driver in not making dumb, irreversible mistakes. When I think of the real Autopilot, in airplans, I think of jumbo jets that can fly and land themselves, supposedly. That being said, fo many years now, I have hard of Airbus planes whose autopilot functions at imes gave the actual pilots little or no control of these humongousplanes at really critical times, and that such design flaws have caused many creh fatalities as a result. Let us recall here that even military grade drone airplanes have pilots. The pilots are elsewhere, on the ground, but they are in control of those otherwise pilotless planes. I seriously foubt that we will see a trul driverless car anytime in the foreseeable future. Given what just happened with this Tesla car, I think the whole driverless car concept needs to be rethought and clear guidelines developed so that manufacturers anf car owners know what it is they have and what constitute safe operating procedures. bCorrect labeling within the vehicles is obviously important as are clear descriptions in owner and repair/maintenance manuals. I would think that the insurance industry would be very inteseyed in this situation as well and on an ongoing basis for the entire automtive sector, inclring for Google, Apple, or any other entity contmating entering the automotive industry from this time forward.
The crash victim was known to record everything whilst driving.
What happened to his camera?
and, for that matter, how would a trucker in an 18 wheeler _hear_ a video playing in a car, over his own engine noise?
I live fairly close to Vancouver BC and there is a ferry you can take to Vancouver Island. From the USA/Canada it's a quick drive to there.
One day there was a gentleman who had driven all the way from California but was not allowed to board the ferry and he ended up talking to the police.
He was driving a motor home, towing a car AND then towing a ski boat behind the car.
What was incredible is that he had driven for 25 or so hours and no one had stopped him or the fact that he ever thought it was safe to do in the first place! It was miraculous that there had been no accident!
If you want to watch a movie, take the bus or train! And, don't forget your headphones!
Sorry, Mr Brown, it is all your fault. Period.
Is it possible to drive an automatic like a manual gearbox?
What do you mean?
Is to possible to manually decide when the vehicle changes speed, like on a manual gearbox?
Yes. As long as the vehicle has actual gears (i.e.: a car with an internal combustion engine) the car will have, in addition to the fully automatic mode ("D" on the gear shift) also have a "sequential gearbox"-mode ("+" and "-" on the gear shift).
Depending on the model, you either tap the stick side ways, or you move the stick to a different position (sometimes called "M") and tap up and down.
This way, your manually control when the gearbox moves to a higher or lower speed.
Depending on your driving style, that might come handy when driving in the mountain.
But the car usually prevents you from destroying it. You can't accelerate to 100km/h while still in 1st gear, the system will shift gear to prevent you from staying too long in over-rev.
On the other hand, this option doesn't exist on vehicle that don't have actual gears (obviously):
(i.e.: there isn't a list of fixed of gear ratio that you select from with a stick, the ratio is a continuously changing real number depending on the speed)
(there's only one fixed ratio ever. But the electric motor itself is always working best no matter its RPMs)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
another tragedy, the result of Godless Harry Potter pandering to Satanic Witchcraft.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Tesla Hater Alarm!!!! Your entire argument is a complete lie! How about you go back and requote what he said accurately? Those choice details you replaced with brackets answered your rhetorical "which is it" question- especially that little "[was]" bit. That should have said "driver AND CAR". Go away ya old lying bastard! Don't you have a carburetor and points to go tweak on?
Well, normally I change speed using the accelerator (errr, "gas pedal") and brake - I suspect you mean changing gear selection, rather than changing speed.
Ooops, sorry. My bad. English isn't my first language, and some of the laguage I speak tend to use the same word for both concept.
'D' for drive ; 'P' for park ; '1' for ultra-low speed (pedestrian-designated areas), '2' for low speed (traffic jams), and 'R' for reversing, as I recall. I don't recall ever seeing a "+" or "-" on the mode selector.
Whoa! I haven't seen "1" and "2" in ages... (And I change frequently cars as I mostly drive them from car-sharing)
1 & 2 are an older simpler and coarser concept:
- instead of the transmission being fully automatic (like in "D") and choosing any possible gear ratio from the list
- 1 and 2 are restricted: they're still automatic but limit the transmission to only a smaller subset of the list of gear ratios.
Nearly any modern non-electric car that I've driven recently has the sequential type of control that I've described before:
- either + or - sign that you tap on the sides of the "D" mode
- or a separate "M" mode that has + and - above and below it
With that, you manually ask the automatic transmission to force gear up and down.
Oh, hang on, I'm not sure if that was an IC engine or an electric - I didn't have any reason to ask.
Usually electric cars won't have old-style 1 and 2 or new-style + and -. Because they only have one single gear ratio and just spin the motor faster or slower without problems.
(In fact even "D" and "R" are purely software. No gears are shifted, only a different pattern is sent to the electro-magnets so the rotor spins in the other direction)
The closest thing I've seen to a mode is an "eco" button sitting nearby the selector that will limit the power consumption of the motor (It will never eat more than xx kW, unless you floor the accelerator pedal) which make it accelerate slower and might limit the top speed, but vastly increase the range.
You've got to press a button on the side of the mode selector before you can change modes - "tapping" it anywhere is prevented by an interlock in the selector. I remember having to figure that out first time I found myself with the keys to an automatic.
So more recent cars have a special mode (either D or M) where tapping is not prevented, but actually signals your wish that the automatic transmission changes gear. (When in the corresponding mode, the selector isn't firmly locked in place, but some wiggling is allowed to convey such commands)
Most more modern cars I've seen tend to have the button not on the side, but so placed (under the forward facing part) that you'll automatically press it when you grasp firmly the selector.
(Also, the mode selector is where a normal gear selector is - not on the steering column, as I see in the movies.
I've never seen a steering-column selector. (Except for specially adapted cars for disabled people, or some weird construction machines)
Which movie do you refer to ?
Or do you refer to the letters display on the dashboard itself ?
The machines don't seem to know when to drop down a gear in order to increase engine revs and power. Totally gutless response in consequence.
More modern car might react if you press the accelerator pedal more firmly and automatically drop gear and rev up to give you more power.
The auto cruise
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]