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Elon Musk: Tesla's Autopilot Software Could Save Half a Million Lives Every Year (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In the wake of a deadly crash involving a Model S that was driving with its Autopilot software turned on, Tesla CEO Elon Musk issued a few interesting remarks on the technology to Fortune. Notably, the publication recently ran a piece attempting to portray Tesla in a bad light by noting that Musk sold more than $2 billion worth of Tesla stock just 11 days after the aforementioned May, 2016 accident. And all the while, shareholders were kept in the dark up until recently. "Indeed, if anyone bothered to do the math (obviously, you did not) they would realize that of the over 1M auto deaths per year worldwide, approximately half a million people would have been saved if the Tesla autopilot was universally available. Please, take 5 mins and do the bloody math before you write an article that misleads the public.
when it doesnt http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/3...
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Pilot-aid would be better and might have saved an extra life.
The Tesla autopilot running under ideal conditions (with a human backup) compared to a human driver under all conditions are not equivalent, and we cannot directly compare their failure rates. Beware of naive statistics.
the lives it could hypothetically save are irrelevant when you need to OWN what went wrong and fix this incident.
Of course multibillionaire is going to defend the product by which selling stocks makes him so much richer.
the proper response would have been telling everyone to DRIVE THEIR CARS like ADULTS while his engineers tear every bit of telemetry down to the bit and figure out how to make sure this doesn't happen again.
This would only be true under ideal circumstances in which everyone and everything worked flawlessly in tandem, and that just isn't the real world any more than the opposite statement. Suck it up, take responsibility, and be a man, Elon. Do the right thing and suspend public trials of this tech until it's truly ready.
How many years will it take for the automated car to be affordable for the common person? I can't afford a car with even the most minimal of automation right now save for standard cruise control. Did anyone catch the article on how the average family can't afford most cars as it is? Most people don't even see the point of buying a new car, much less an automated new car. Saving lives with automation is a pipe dream until there is a plan to make these something that everyone can buy which isn't going to happen any time soon. Stop making it an excuse to kill people with experimentation.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Their idea of who dies may not be your idea.
In retirement communities where people will die at some point? Sure. Way safer than now.
For people given a DUI? Sure. Way safer than now.
But for everyone? Probably not a good idea.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Minus however many have tragic unrelated accidents after their name appears on some watchlist because some jackass doesn't like you dating his sister, or because you've disagreed with the trump regime, or because you tried to metaphorically "blow a whistle of some kind"...
Autopilot and remote hacking are a recipe for things to turn to bad sci-fi, which is exactly what some nasty people want from this.
n/t
He continued, “Indeed, if anyone bothered to do the math (obviously, you did not) they would realize that of the over 1M auto deaths per year worldwide, approximately half a million people would have been saved if the Tesla autopilot was universally available. Please, take 5 mins and do the bloody math before you write an article that misleads the public.”
Are these projections from peer-reviewed research published in a proper journal? Are these projections based on public Tesla claims? Is this Elon Musk pulling numbers out of his trunk?
Considering these are real lives of actual people at stake I hope Tesla did some serious research before selling these to the public.
I stole this Sig
That level of wealth alone would save far more lives. Anybody who could afford a Tesla could also afford clean drinking water, air conditioning, medicine, proper nutrition, etc. Musk is just taking in one figure and ignoring the fact that so much of the world is driving a run-down beater that doesn't have anti-lock brakes, or they're just driving motor scooters which are far more dangerous, or they're driving nothing at all and hauling water from toxic wells because of POVERTY. How about Musk buy a helmet for every 3rd world motor-scooter rider, then get back to us on this?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I think there's a huge unrealized danger to these quasi-autonomous cars because people will treat them like a a fully controlled car and do things they shouldn't (e.g. read the news paper, watch a movie, doze off, etc.). Right now the drivers of these expensive Tesla cars are not representative of the larger driving public. If we put this technology into 100% of the cars on the road I predict the number of accidents due to imperfect AI will rise significantly because of driver inattention. It may still prove to be an improvement over human controlled, but I doubt the numbers of lives saved will be what Musk claims.
Give me a car that will take me to work while I nap in the backseat. I have no interest in being on the road filled with semi-autonomous cars.
Elon Musk's math relies on the assumption that the next death with Autopilot won't occur for another 130 million miles, and that he should be calculating based on the 60 million miles per fatality (Worldwide) number, not the 94 million miles (USA) number. If we calculate on the USA number, we see a fatality improvement of 27.7%, assuming Autopilot keeps its current track record. Still good but not a full 50%+ improvement as Musk claims.
It's just a bit ironic for Elon Musk to claim that the media is misleading the public when he is also cherry-picking the numbers he likes to make his company look good, particularly when Autopilot hasn't even been around long enough to see more than one death occur. Until we see at least a few more deaths, we won't really have much of a true idea how safe Autopilot is.
Personally, I want autonomous vehicles to be here now, but I also recognize we need more "burn-in" time on the technology before it's safe for the masses. A human being paying attention would certainly have seen a tractor-trailer. Autopilot did not. That's a problem (among a number of others, I'm sure) that must be solved before an automaker can feel confident in this space.
His claim of removing half of accidents is based on... nothing. And talking about being misleading, he's an expert at it. Top Gear and the New York Times both ran into his being misleading and manipulative.
..and half of people think its the fault of the tool he was (mis)using.
Frankly Tesla's autopilot isn't all that special. It's just a combination of lane keeping, adaptive cruise control, and brake assist that pretty much is available from any car company.
There will never be an automated system if any kind that won't cause deaths.
Just because when your auto-pilot is activated, there have been half the number of deaths per kilometre doesn't mean you an save half the people who died in car accidents.
It's only used on highways. That's a road with no pedestrians to kill.
If keeps you in your lane and attempts to keep a safe following distance from the car in front of you (unless a truck pulls out infront of you, it keeps driving at it at full speed and kills you)
In Britain 60% of deaths occur on country roads, not highways, where street lighting and road markings are lacking.
Probably similar in other counties.
Anyone have a link to a article on the other one? I can't seem to find any other fatal incidents involving the autopilot.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I love the idea of self-driving cars, but I think it's going to be hard to get it to work acceptably "as is", that is, the way the problem is being approached.
Much of the decision-making must remain "onboard" the car but I think self-driving vehicles will be vastly improved with some feedback and control signals from the road or a locale-specific traffic guidance computer.
In other words, in addition to its own decision-making software, the vehicle should also be receiving some sort of signals or guidance info from the road in the area it's currently passing through.
Sort of an air-traffic control system where responsibility for air traffic is handed off from control center to control center as the plane makes its way from point A to point B. The difference is that this guidance should be completely automated, and be an adjunct to what the car does, not its primary means of navigation. I'm see this primarily as speed and road condition management info.
I know, I know- what about hackers? Yeah, that'll be an issue for sure, but it can be mitigated by the use of some solid encryption routines and boundary-monitoring, i.e. to make sure that a Bad Guy(tm) doesn't hack the controller and tell all the vehicles in its area to all speed up to 100mph or whatever. Or to tell 1/2 to speed up and 1/2 to come to a dead stop. Some things shouldn't be able to be overridden, such as max speed and collision avoidance.
In short, I think autonomous vehicles would be better (and probably safer) if they not only thought for themselves, but also were receiving some sanity-checking and guidance info specific to the road or area they travel on.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
it killed one. And that's the one you'll be sued for.
captcha: flunked
If the car drives itself people are not going to pay attention. That is simple human factors, people have trouble concentrating, the more task you take away from them the harder they will have remaining focused. They will day dream, count sheep, .... They will not be ready for the instant they have to take control.
This self driving has to be 100% or nothing if it is going to "save lives". 95% is just going to leave holes that inattentive people will fall into.
Musk needs more human science in his process.
One of the best aspects of self driving cars is not having to pay attention. "Wake me up when we get there" sounds awesome to me. It could also help alleviate traffic since many people will head out at night so that they can sleep for longer drives.
The truth of the matter is, Tesla pretty much HAS to come out swinging, defending its self-driving technology, or else it's easily "game over" before it even really gets started for them. Somebody had to release the tech for the general public to use first, and Tesla took the chance. (The other car manufacturers have been far more conservative with things, offering only "emergency braking / collision detection and avoidance" or just parallel parking assist.... individual components that would make up a "self driving car".)
That said? I agree with the folks here saying his stats are way off the mark and unrealistic. Since you can't even use his technology right now when not on a highway, it's not even an option for saving any lives in collisions that happen on smaller roads.
I think it was Mercedes or maybe Audi who commented that the Tesla system uses cameras and computer AI to determine if something is in the car's way. Their system used radar in conjunction with cameras, which sounds superior to me.
It's all marketing hype and mere armchair statistics.
Fortune doesn't know how to do the math, I don't know how to do the math, Musk doesn't know how to do the math, but perhaps a few readers of this comment could do the math.
It would take 275 million miles of autonomous driving to have any confidence at all that an autonomous car is safer than a human driver.
Ars Technica reported on it, and if you want to see the math, the RAND corporation, who are kind of experts at the math, have a detailed report available, which explains the math.
Basically, while the marketing engine can claim that autonomous driving is safer, it's not even possible to have any proof of it within any reasonable level of statistical confidence.
I mean, sure, we try to make driving safer, and assisted driving may help, but please, let's be realistic about where we're at.
Apparently there's more general intelligence required in autonomous driving than just collision avoidance. The road condition is far more complex than just pavement with markings and moving objects. Until then all auto-pilot is just assisted driving and should be recognized as such.
...that literally wants to detonate nukes on planet Mars.
To lazy to post citation, find it yourself if you didn't already know.
Yeah, someone who's last name rhymes with "tusk".
Holy shit. And if they took a train instead, it could save approximately ONE MILLION LIVES.
Seriously, I understand that in an age of Martin Shkreli and Star of David dogwhistles, subtlety in manipulating opinion has become something of a lost art, but you would think that a genius billionaire and future Emperor of Mars could be a little less ham-handed.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you feel you can save all those lives and it's for the greater good, capitalism be damned, give the technology to all that want it free of charge.
Maybe you'll make up the R&D and IP costs in goodwill and new customers, maybe you won't... it's for the greater good.
Before we talk about numbers let's just say that yes the car should have stopped or at least applied breaks and tried to stop Period. That it doesn't recognize an elevated obstruction as a road hazard is a design flaw. An automated car or automatic braking system should see the path in front of it and brake. That the Tesla appears to disregard anything above hood level needs to be fixed either in this model or the next. The car needs to know its clearances and be able to sense its surroundings and project a path with at least those clearances.
That said, even this relatively simple highway driving autopilot does appear to be relatively safe compared with the overall driving numbers. Also, since the driver was at the wheel and also never applied the brakes it is questionable whether there was enough time for a human driver to react to getting cut off by the tractor trailer. Either way this is unfortunate for the driver, family and friends but in terms of safety it appears we are overall not worse off with the potential to be much better off as any issues like this are worked out in the real world.
Still it makes sense to look at whether a software fix is possible or whether a hardware sensor fix is needed for the height clearance issue. Ideally they can just fix the code and send out an overnight update.
Tens of dollars...
Elon Musk is full of it, and frankly the marketing speak is BS. This system is a step above cruise control in terms of safety. The legalese will get his butt off the hook as the driver was clearly being a dumbass - but his behavior was instigated by this broad-stroke speech by Tesla. This sort of overstatement of safety, capabilities, ect. as well as car manufacturer propensity for cheaping out on sensors will keep my hands firmly planted on the wheel for at least the next decade or two.
I hope musk is killed at the hands of one of his rolling dead traps.
Powerful tools in untrained/stupid hands.
That's the problem every time, be it with computers, nuclear fission, cars or whatnot.
Look what people are doing with the Tesla "Autopilot". Pure and utter reckless fooling around. No wonder people die.
From all we know it's pretty certain the man was watching a f*cking DVD while being the responsible handler of an automobile.
That alone should cost you a drivers licence for a lifetime!
I'm glad he only killed his own stupid self and not somebody else. That would've been a real drag.
This way it's just darwin at work.
It's only a shame Tesla is getting all the bad rap for his stupidity.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This is true, if he could build it at a price point white collar employees could afford, or if he could even build them for a profit. He's soaking down hundreds of millions in taxpayer subsidies while still running a loss. His arrogance is amazing, the cheapness of buying politicians disturbing.
Perhaps they are referring to the pocket dialed into the trailer guy.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I checked the article saw a distinct lack of any maths. How exactly have they proven that this system is twice as good as a human driver?
Rocket Surgeon.
While it really should to be able to detect a semitrailer parked in front of it AFAIK no one died in that incident.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
10s of cents, but the click-bait ad-revenue counts for something too, eventually.
Typical PR nonsense. x could save y lives therefore please conclude that more of 'x' is needed and we should be thanked rather than scolded for fucking up.
Also lets draw a bunch of conclusions invoking statistics with a sample size of 1 and hope nobody notices.
Elon does not live in the same world as 99.99% of humanity.
Collision avoidance technology are becoming more widespread over time.
What used to be only available on high range Volvos and Mercedes has now trickled down and even the smaller and cheaper VW Up! have LIDARs used for "City Safety" (=automatic brake to avoid collision with pedestrians and with other vehicle at in-city speed ranges) as a standard option.
And that is the car currently available as the cheapest option of the fleet of some car-sharing companies.
It *is* getting affordable.
(Well for a certain category of affordable. More likely in european cities here around. Not sure about you, US).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
DOS hacking may more likely what if get there hands some work zone lane closures field generators and use that to shut down an road.
The evil is finally revealed. Musk is only saving lives because that will make the population rise faster which will boost the profitability of SpaceX and his Mars Colony, Muskland!
I think that the term "autopilot" simply gives end-users the wrong mindset for the feature. It encourages them to simply disengage from the act of driving completely.
Which is fucking idiotic.
It's essentially a "driver assist" feature. It's not meant to simply be turned on and walked away from like the autopilot in a plane.
Even there, it's still monitored by someone in the cockpit. On top of that, jets normally don't have to worry about millions of other jets in their slice of the sky at any given time...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Maths & Journalism don't mix just look at the press coverage of the UK EU Referendum
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
With every car and tech company working on their own self-driving system, inevitably, some cars will be safer than others, due to better software/hardware.
Free-market competition aside, it would be great to see all companies develop a community/open-source approach, where the software is developed together and issued to all vehicles, upgraded at the same time. (Also an opportunity to develop common protocols for vehicles to "talk" to each other)
Ethically (ha ha, yes, I know this is car business) -- if one company's software is much better at detecting pedestrians than everyone else's, how could they not be required to share that code with everyone else to reduce the risk of human injury/fatalities?
Total
Deaths %
Arterial 20,233 62
Collector 5,654 17
Local 6,070 19
Total 32,675 100
Arterial are highways, and all are high speeds, so ~2/3 are highways. As such, the roads that AP is used on has an average fatality rate of 1 / 40-45 million miles. Compare that to 1 fatality / 130+ million miles by a Tesla running AP.
Even now, Tesla AP is saving a number of lives.
Reminds me of the French Committee on Public Safety.
This was the group of people in charge of lopping heads off during the French Revolution.
The SAFETY group is the one killing indiscriminately.
Or I can flip a bit and it could take half a million lives every year.
I don't think your arbitrary "few more years of work" standard is of much value. If it takes minutes to fix, then so be it.
Just need to make sure it defaults to stopping if the path isn't clear and then the worst thing a distracted driver can do is miss the exit.
If it can do that *reliably*, as well as slowing for predictable hazards like deer in or near the road (a common hazard along many stretches of highway), then sure, once it's shown to be capable, by all means bring it to market. But you seem to be subscribing to the idea that this product is almost ready for unsupervised usage - something even Tesla spokespeople vehemently deny. Until the company is, at the very least, willing to make the legally binding claim that the software is in fact suitable for unsupervised usage, they have no business putting it on the road at all. By doing so they are putting the lives of both their customers and uninvolved bystanders at risk while attempting to deny responsibility for the predictable outcomes.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
There is no such thing as what you are describing. A s far as I know states so far have been unwilling to certify cars for unsupervised autonomous operation. For Tesla to claim such a thing would actually violate the law.
Right. I must have been imagining the Google cars that don't even have steering wheels.
Whether Tesla can legally endorse such usage is a separate issue - but until they're wiling to step up and take full responsibility for people using the feature in the only way they can reasonably be expected to (i.e. not paying any attention to the road), they shouldn't be releasing it. And I suspect the law wouldn't even prevent them from saying they stood by it's suitability for such usage, and they were lobbying to make it legal.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
California required they put the steering wheels back in.
Supervised driving is inherently going to delay human reaction time compared with manual driving. But that doesn't mean it is overall less safe
Someday, Autopilot Software will be so good they won't need to have expensive safety features like passenger airbags or windshield wipers.
So far, it seems that there are reports of one death and one rollover incident - which could easily have become a death if circumstances had been different in ways that were not related to what decisions the car made.
Two incidents isn't a valid statistical sample from which to extrapolate to half a million deaths...perhaps just one person got lucky one day - if they'd died then Tesla would only be able to claim that their system is no worse than people driving without assistance. Perhaps the one person who died was exceedingly unlucky and Tesla would save very nearly everyone who used their software.
The fine details of what happened in those two wrecks (and more importantly in the unknown number of very-very-nearly wrecks) is what matters here and that won't be known until Tesla's have been driven under these conditions for ten times as long as they have to date.
What we know from the Tesla data right now is that their system isn't a total disaster (we haven't seen 100 deaths) - but predicting half a million lives saved isn't good statistics. The correct conclusion from what we know is: "We don't know yet".
www.sjbaker.org
The problem with adding radar is that when 100 cars around you are also using radar. Distinguishing your reflected radar pings from those of another car nearby - or an oncoming car starts to get exceedingly difficult. We know it's possible because an entire swarm of bats can echo-locate together - but that doesn't make it an easy task. Worse still, to do it right requires careful attention to the frequencies and waveshape of the RF chirp you use...that's fine if one company designs all of the autonomous car radar transmitters - but not so good if every car manufacturer develops their own system in secrecy as seems to be happening right now.
If radar is to be a part of the answer - there need to be standards. Ditto for lidar and acoustic techniques.
If it's possible to make this work safely using only a couple of cameras (which is the way humans drive cars) - then I think that's a more robust solution for the longer term when there are many, many more cars on the road with these kinds of features.
www.sjbaker.org