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Second Tesla Autopilot Crash Under Review By US Regulators (time.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Wall Street Journal and many other publications are reporting that U.S. auto-safety regulators are currently reviewing a second crash that occurred while Tesla's Autopilot mode was activated. The Detroit Free Press reports that a Michigan art gallery owner told police that he survived a rollover crash that happened when his Tesla Model X was in self-driving mode last Friday. The newspaper didn't disclose any additional details regarding what led up to the accident and whether or not the driver was to blame. Last week, it was reported that U.S. regulators were investigating Tesla after a fatal crash occurred involving a vehicle using the Autopilot mode. Tesla said in a statement after that incident, "This is the first known fatality in just over 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated." They also said Autopilot "is an assist feature that requires you to keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times."
The robots are starting to revolt and killing a few people at a time...
I like Elon, electric vehicles, and autonomous vehicles. But I hope they get hit hard for calling their adaptive cruise control feature "autopilot".
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
From this report (chart on page 7), a passenger car rollover (ie - not a light truck) begets a 16% chance of fatality.
This is not the first Tesla rollover crash I've read about, the other one would lead me to believe that Teslas are in fact safer than average. (Click the link and see for yourself, the crash was reportedly spectacular.)
Of the crash in question, Tesla had this to say:
“We received an automated alert from this vehicle on July 1 indicating airbag deployment, but logs containing detailed information on the state of the vehicle controls at the time of the collision were never received. This is consistent with damage of the severity reported in the press, which can cause the antenna to fail. As we do with all crash events, we immediately reached out to the customer to confirm they were ok and offer support but were unable to reach him. We have since attempted to contact the customer three times by phone without success. Based on the information we have now, we have no reason to believe that Autopilot had anything to do with this accident.”
The owner *claims* that the car was in autopilot, but we don't really know yet.
Also of note, the following (from same link):
[...] As reported yesterday, the police investigator on the case, Dale Vukovich, said that he is likely to charge Scaglione after his investigation without specifying the charges.
I'm going to wait a couple of days before making any judgements on this specific incident.
At the worst, it *may be* that autopilot mode isn't appropriate for human drivers simply due to the chance of it being misused. If too many people are relying on it when they shouldn't, then it likely should be taken off the market.
But that's an entirely different situation from Tesla being negligent, or unsafe, or unpromising.
Tesla's coverage of these incidents is a smear campaign.
GM, Ford and Chrysler experienced hundreds of vehicle accidents in the same time span.
In 2014, there were 32,675 deaths by vehicle incident. Not one of those is getting the same attention as these Tesla reports. Why?
Because the media is in the pockets of Big Auto. Every day in 2014, there were almost 90 deaths in all the other car manufacturers vehicles. I'm counting only two accidents in Tesla vehicles. That's actually quite good!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Here's hoping it *does* mess everything up for semi-autonomous systems like Tesla's. These belong in public transport, where you have a relatively controlled environment running down predetermined routes where outside factors can be mitigated, and where the drivers are employees who can be regularly trained and tested on their knowledge of the system's capabilities. An autopilot function makes sense in, say, a bus.
Where it most definitely does not make sense is in passenger cars, where the moronic part of our population (that is, most of it) will assume it to be far more capable than it really is, and who will choose simply to ignore the system once it is operating. In passenger cars, nothing less than a 100% reliable, full-time autopilot function is acceptable, and we're not even slightly close to that being a reality.
With a little luck, Tesla's idiotic hype will ensure that the failures of these systems get enough publicity to regulate them out of being until such time as we are able to create a system that can run reliably in all conditions and on all road types. Leave the tech whizbang crap where it belongs in public transport, and get it out of passenger cars, please!
Because they're operating solely on hype. Bells and whistles and form-before-function design are what generate hype. If anything, expect any negative publicity from these incidents to cause Tesla to double-down on the hype, and therefore, on the bells and whistles. (In fact, based on Musk's utterly disingenuous and insupportable claims about the number of people who would be saved if Tesla's autopilot function were standard in every car, they're already doubling down on it.)
Why do they call it "Autopilot" if it is only "an assist feature that requires you to keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times"? Tesla deserves all of the bad press they're getting.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Here's hoping that a few fools silly enough to trust their lives, and by extension others' lives, with something in beta doesn't mess up everything for autonomous vehicle research.
Here's hoping that companies have the ethics to not deceptively name their products as being more autonomous than they are. The term "autopilot" strongly suggests an automatic pilot, i.e., with little or no human intervention. Tesla created a media firestorm with their "Autopilot" feature, which very likely increased the number of deposits placed on the Model 3, bumping their bottom line. But the truth is that "Autopilot" is nothing at all like an autopilot. Tesla's branding, marketing and product information is misleading, deceptive, and already appears to have taken a life. I love technology, but I despise misleading claims, especially deadly ones.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
It is not auto-pilot or an autonomous car, it is just an advanced cruise control with a lane warning and brake assist system. Any driver that fails to stay focused while behind the wheel of a vehicle under any circumstances gets what they deserve and should be further prosecuted for negligent operation of a car.
Just because a route is predetermined does not mean that outside factors can be mitigated in any meaningful way. Jackasses cut off busses and cross over in front of light rail trains all the time.
Any system that can assist and warn a driver should be heralded not bashed when the failing component is almost certainly going to be the air-gap in the driver seat.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
autopilot is an add-on (something like $5k) depending on whether or not your car already has the needed sensors. You don't HAVE to buy it. You can have a "normal" electric Tesla.
Well that depends on what you think an Autopilot actually is, doesn't it? An avionics autopilot pretty much flies in a straight line and warns you if it notices something it doesn't know how to deal with, with the assumption that you have at least one or two pilots at the helm at all times monitoring for more complex problems. The Tesla autopilot is far more competent that that.
On the other hand, in the air there's rarely any nearby obstructions, nor surprises other than turbulance, so the urgency of maintaining attention is far less - if it takes you 10 seconds to asses the situation you probably still have plenty of time to recover. So the autopilot doesn't need to be particularly competent to maintain adequate safety margins. And, even among pilots that should really know better, there are periodic airline crashes due to pilots assuming the autopilot is something more than "cruise control with course corrections".
Regardless of what you think the name implies though, releasing such half-baked semi-autonomous driving systems is completely irresponsible - the entire purpose of the system is to diminish the required human input to the point that intervention is only required in rare "corner cases" separated by, on average, hundreds or thousands of hours of uneventful operation in which you learn to trust its infallibility. Given the well-understood weaknesses in human risk assessment and attention maintenance, there's no way such a won't be horribly abused by almost all operators.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
"autopilot" suggests hands-free, driverless.
This is exactly what it has meant in aviation for decades.
The feature would be better called "driver assist" or something--clearly indicating in the name itself that it absolutely does not *replace* the driver.
I don't care how many warning labels you attach to it and instruction manuals telling you not to let go of the wheel--if you call it *autopilot* people are going to think the feature is more than it is--and they *will* test it--as obviously has already happened.
---- what did you think was going to happen?
I am not willing to let Musk off on this one. He is a promoter whose spell-binding sales pitch always promises more than he is able to deliver.
Conspiracies are the homeopathy of the paranoid delusional; the less evidence there is, the more true it must be!
=Smidge=
They also said Autopilot "is an assist feature that requires you to keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times."
Here's the problem with that. The folks at Tesla HAVE to know that at least some of the people who use the technology are going to take their hands off the wheel. If they don't then they are weapons grade stupid and that seems unlikely. IANAL but it may not matter that Tesla warned people to keep their hands on the wheel given that it is reasonably foreseeable that some portion of the drivers would ignore those instructions. After all, they called it Autopilot for crying out loud... If strict liability is applied there is no need to prove fault, negligence, or intention. See Escola v Coca-Cola Bottling. Now maybe strict liability doesn't apply here but the point remains that manufacturers tend to be responsible for reasonably foreseeable consequences of the features of their products. I have a feeling that the autopilot features may have been released prematurely regardless of the claims of Tesla to the contrary. I love that Tesla is pushing boundaries but they need to tread carefully when it comes to safety.
Can't recall seeing where AutoPilot drops out if both hands come off the wheel, Elon.
Pride goeth before the crash.
They also said Autopilot "is an assist feature that requires you to keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times."
With outward sensors almost capable of highway driving (almost, but not quite), you'd think inward-facing sensors (that ensure the driver's attention is on the road) would be a piece of cake for Tesla.
But no. Instead, Telsa 'requires' something, and simultaneously makes it trivial to ignore that requirement. Tesla must enforcing inward looking sensors. With power comes accountability.
Unless, in some weird way, avoiding the 'look in' is a hallmark of Tesla's culture.
Here's hoping that a few fools silly enough to trust their lives, and by extension others' lives, with something in beta doesn't mess up everything for autonomous vehicle research.
Here's hoping that companies have the ethics to not deceptively name their products as being more autonomous than they are. The term "autopilot" strongly suggests an automatic pilot, i.e., with little or no human intervention. Tesla created a media firestorm with their "Autopilot" feature, which very likely increased the number of deposits placed on the Model 3, bumping their bottom line. But the truth is that "Autopilot" is nothing at all like an autopilot. Tesla's branding, marketing and product information is misleading, deceptive, and already appears to have taken a life. I love technology, but I despise misleading claims, especially deadly ones.
I have a label too; Darwin Award Winner, as I rather despise fucking idiots who can't read the manual. I'm fairly certain the flashing-lights-beta-mode warning signs were thought of well before putting this technology in the hands of the average moron with more money than brains.