Slashdot Mirror
Elon Musk: Autopilot Feature Was Disabled In Pennsylvania Crash (latimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In response to the third reported Autopilot crash, which was the first of three where there were no fatalities, Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that the Model X's Autopilot feature was turned off. He tweeted Thursday afternoon that the onboard vehicle logs show that the semi-autonomous driving feature was turned off in the crash. "Moreover, crash would not have occurred if it was on," he added. The driver of the Model X told police he was using the Autopilot feature, according to the Detroit Free Press. The vehicle flipped over after hitting a freeway guardrail. U.S. auto-safety regulators have been investigating a prior crash that occurred while Tesla's Autopilot mode was activated. Late Thursday afternoon and into early Friday, Musk made some comments on the improvements made to its radar technology used to achieve full driving autonomy. "Working on using existing Tesla radar by itself (decoupled from camera) w temporal smoothing to create a coarse point cloud, like lidar," he tweeted. "Good thing about radar is that, unlike lidar (which is visible wavelength), it can see through rain, snow, fog and dust." Musk has rejected Lidar technology in the past, saying it's unnecessary to achieve full driving autonomy. Consumer Reports is calling on Tesla to "disable hands-free operation until its system can be made safer."
Tesla cars don't support hands-free operation. You're supposed to keep your hands on the steering wheel while using autopilot, and the car will disable auto pilot after a while if you take your hands off the wheel.
Perhaps they should reduce that timeout to discourage people from taking their hands off the wheel entirely.
Yes, because the word of the driver who totaled his car is also entirely reliable. I mean, it's not like he'd be liable if he crashed it himself, but could get a lot of money if Autopilot was the problem.
You can almost see this autopilot thing becoming an excuse whenever the car crashes. Me? Nah! It was the car! I swear it was the car! I am an always responsible driver! How can you dare saying that I am responsible for the car... it was the car itself I tell you! This AI is just bad I swear!
So now that it is clear that *I* the driver has no fault on the crash, could you please not raise my insurance?... or prosecute me for killing that pedestrian, or running over that biker?... it was clearly not the alcohol... but the car!
I'm glad they kept logs. Even if the logs are not 100% reliable, it is better than just the word of an honest driver that just happens to have someone to blame it onto.
....is the per-mile-driven accident rate greater or less with Autopilot (or equivalent) enabled? Basically, it's a "perfect is the enemy of the good" situation whereby some folks seem to want to limit autonomous driving until it is 100% perfect when we all know that humans are far, far less reliable.
If the accident was preventable, the driver should of prevented it. They should be paying attention to the road and be in a position to respond. If it wasn't preventable by the driver, then the system is working at least as well as the driver in that situation. Either way, the system isn't responsible.
And for what it's worth, that doesn't mean the system couldn't/shouldn't be improved. It just means they didn't die because of the system.
So "victim's claims" are more accurate than "actual vehicle logs", eh? Your paranoia/hate is duly noted....
Or maybe the driver just lied to cover up the fact that he was a poor driver who lost control and hit a guard rail. After all a car hitting a guard rail has never happened before driver assist was implemented. Nor has any driver attempted to cover their a$$ by lying to the cops about what they were doing that led up to the crash. I dropped the roach and was trying to find it when I slammed into the car ahead of me...err no that's not what happened
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Exactly. Autopilot has to be the best excuse for wrecking your car ever invented. "No no, I didn't do it, the car did it itself. Really!"
Hourglass says she knows a kid in Iowa who grows up to be president.
I love that the feature wasn't even on. Go ask any insurance adjuster and let them tell you if people lie about accidents. But even if it was, this feature is just a cruise control that also keeps you in your lane and might brake when an object is in your way. It is literally a far safer cruise control than any other vehicle. This doesn't mean you can sleep while using it, same as other cruise control. If I told you I had a helmet that made injuries to the brain 50% less likely, that wouldn't mean you can use it to dive off a building head first. Using products in ways other than intended is not the fault of Tesla.
So what. It's not an either/or situation. Both sides have an incentive to spin things, that's not by itself an argument for the other side.
Yes, there are dishonest people out there. But also anyone with experience in mass production will tell you that real life has a tendency to make flukes and quirks happen sooner than later. There's just too many factors in the production line and in the end user environment to account for all possible defects. Cars are not simple apps running on heroku, there's a physical and mechanical element to consider.
Ever heard of problems with early MAP sensors back when they were installed inside the cab? Difference of temperature in winter tended to cause condensation in the line, but by the time the car was on the lift at the dealership, the condensation was gone. In hindsight the problem is obvious, but back then the "conclusive tests" made by the manufacturer made them treat honest people like crooks or idiots.
lucm, indeed.
It can. Note that in an airplane, the pilot is expected to remain alert and at the controls while autopilot is engaged.
Actually I hesitate to trust Tesla in this. It's possible the driver did not have Autopilot engaged but that doesn't remove Tesla from fault; if the system is insufficiently explained it's possible the driver believed he had Autopilot engaged when he did not, creating an unsafe situation.
If Tesla's UI doesn't make it clear that autopilot is not engaged and the driver believes that it is, then Tesla is at fault for not providing sufficient information to the driver.
"well it's only in beta". In which case it should never have been out on the public road.
Engineering doesn't work that way. Driving is a complicated enough task that working out the majority of the kinks in an autopilot system will requires billions of miles of road testing to start approaching "perfect". That would require hundreds of billions of dollars in testing costs. In the mean time, tens of thousands of drivers per year get killed in avoidable accidents. At some point, you have to stop and realize that the cost of "perfect" far exceeds the cost of getting it on the road in an unpolished state. You also have to realize that some part of that cost will be in human lives (on both sides of the equation).
If the airline manufacturers had to get it perfect, we would still be testing aircraft today, and the only air travel we would have would be blimps. Instead, we have the NTSB and FAA, which work to ensure that air traffic safety improves as time goes by. There is no guarantee that you won't die tomorrow in a horrible plane crash. The guarantee you do get is that the engineers will figure out why it happened and take steps to prevent further occurrences. The same approach has been true for automobiles, and cars today are the safest they have ever been, but like controlled flight, the most dangerous component is the pilot/driver. Autopilots on planes have been improving rapidly over the last 20 years, and even the pilot induced crashes are less frequent than they used to be. The sooner we can begin this iterative improvement process for over the road vehicles, the sooner we can start to see a reduction in auto accidents. Even if autonomous vehicles are worse today, if they end up reducing automobile fatalities by as little as 10% per year when they are mature, then having them kill an excess of 15,000 people over that 5 year span while they are still being "perfected", is a break even as far as human lives are concerned. In that time, Tesla has killed an average of 4 per year, or 20 lives paid for the technology that will save thousands per year when it is fully mature. You would have to be an idiot not to take that deal.
Given the stakes, Congress should take steps today to structure the process in exactly the same way as the very successful air safety system the whole world uses to reduce airline crashes. As part of that, I would take it one step further, and automatically indemnify any auto manufacturer that releases their system designs for public scrutiny.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted