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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."
I always trust log files when they are generated by a piece of software that is under investigation for being unreliable. It's up there in terms of foolproof evidence, right next to people taking the stand when they're accused of murder or some other worse-than-perjury crime.
lucm, indeed.
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.
Face it, LIDAR is too pricey at the moment and all the car makers are trying to get a crap system out ahead of each other. Someone died because of it.
turned off the Autopilot.
Autoland not installed on this aircraft.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If the driver believed the autopilot was on when it was off, then we have to ask "why did he think it was on when it was off?"
Was the driver not paying attention to the system, and just assumed it was on, or did the system lie and tell the driver that it was on when it wasn't?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
musk must be desperate to assert things that cannot be verified independently and in direct contradiction to victim' claims.
this sort of thing, even if true, should be better coming from an independent source.
"Good thing about radar is that, unlike lidar (which is visible wavelength), it can see through rain, snow, fog and dust."
Somehow it missed a 40 tonne truck though.
Is that incident being investigated by the NTSB? Because parties to an NTSB investigation who release information outside the framework of that process tend to get a not-so-nice letter from the Justice Dept.
sPh
....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.
Is anyone else not the least bit concerned that Tesla has this level of access to vehicle logs and is free to blab about them publicly?
Anyone find it ironic that the source for this information is from Detroit? I'm sure bias has nothing to do with this.
No. No one died because of technology. People died because they are not using the technology correctly. Tesla let the drivers know that the tech was in beta, Telsa let the drivers know to pay attention and still be alert and able to take control if the system fails to do exactly what it failed to do.
Tech fails all the time, and thats OK, because programmers find the holes and improve the technology. Like people, its not full-proof. It gets better when people use it more. How many windows patches would there be if MS was still keeping it in a lab and trying to perfect it by themselves, to say nothing of FOSS. Use is the evolutionary process in software. Tesla Autopilot is already at human levels when statistically compared, and perhaps better even.
So some one died. Thats sad. But the ROI on human life will be redeemed exponentially when the technology gets good enough to reduces fatalities on roadways to less than the hundreds of thousands we have today. Tesla and the rest of them are taking the dangers out of transportation for millions of users. They will make mistakes along the way, but the benefit is worth the cost here. Everyone who agrees to the Telsa Autopilot TOS agrees too, and if the users would follow the instructions more carefully, then the cost wouldn't be as high.
The phrase is "should have", moron.
morons are losers with no social life whom hold slashdot comments someone writes while eating and watching tv to the grammar standards of a published article. since you understood what the guy meant, the comment was just fine. get a life loser. me, I'm writing this on the shitter, and if I miss a comma it's because I was distracted pushing out a brother for you. nigger.
This kind of thing - at the very least the finger pointing surrounding it - is why until now nobody put "beta" heavy machinery in the hands of the general public.
The general public should never be assumed to use things as designed - not all product liability lawsuits are as frivolous as they are sometimes portrayed.
I would probably find Tesla negligent just on the grounds that they are assuming people won't abuse (or even simply misuse!) the feature. Waivers notwithstanding - it would be interesting to see those in court, because I guarantee just about everyone who signed one would have to say "I just signed it to get the shiny, I don't know what it said" if they were being honest. This means there is no evidence of expectation in the general public that these things are "beta".
Put another way: you can call something "beta" all you want in theory, but if you're selling it to the general public, it ain't in practice.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
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.
This is complete and utter nonsense. In that case the system completely failed to detect a truck right in front of it. You know what the system is designed to do? Detect objects in front of the car and brake accordingly.
Should the idiot driver have been paying attention? Yes, absolutely. Should the autopilot system have detected the truck and applied brakes? Yes, absolutely. The system failed and all Musk and his Musketeers can say is "well it's only in beta". In which case it should never have been out on the public road. It's a sad day when Google, of all companies, is taking a more restrained approach to beta testing than Tesla.
The guy died when the autopilot system failed, and because he was a dick who expected it to work better than it does. This isn't an either/or blame situation. Both the driver and the autopilot are at fault here.
It still doesn't excuse it, moron. Fucking kids, can't even spare the extra calories to type two more characters. GTFO.
Isn't "autopilot" just a fancy version of cruise control, meaning there is an almost uncountable amout of situationans that a driver may encounter that this system would NOT be able to deal with? This reminds me of the Simpsons in a couple epiodes where a character though cruise control ment self driving and would crashbthe car shortly thereafter.
Can they even talk about whether it was on or off
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.
Face it, you are only supporting someone with bad grammar because your grammar skills are lacking.
My Drivers Ed teacher thir*cough* years ago had a story, I don't know if it was true but it was funny. A kid he was teaching was told to put on the cruise control during the freeway portion. He did, and took his hands off the wheel. He thought Cruise Control was an auto-pilot.
He ended up passing, but they stopped having people use cruise control.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It's a little more than that. Autopilot combines adaptive cruise control (matches speed of traffic ahead), lane-centring assist (automatically turns to keep you in the middle of the lane if you drift around), automatic emergency braking (if you get too close to something at speed and it will automatically hit the breaks if you don't), and automatic lane changing (hit the signal and it changes lanes for you).
Except for the lane changing trick, none of these are new things. Adaptive cruise control has existed since the 90s (Mercedes' Distronic system), automatic lane centring since 2003 (Honda's Lane Keep Assist System), and automatic braking also became available in 2003 (Toyota's Pre-Collision System). The latter is also going to become mandatory for all new cars in the USA and EU in 2022.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
This article has nothing to do with somebody dying. Are you talking about the semi truck incident in Florida? Could it have at least something to do with a driver using BETA software NOT paying attention to the road as they were instructed to do numerous times?
It was turned off 0.001 seconds ago, which we all know is an eternity in computing speed.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
actually, pretty good grammar skills, I'm a bit older, have traveled the world, speak 5 languages, worked on hundred page rfp responses presented to vps of huge companies, etc. no, I'm not kidding. but bright now for example, I'm watching a movie in French while sitting on the crapper and typing this. some errors I'm sure I make on my own. some I usually insert to annoy idiots like you. butt more importantly, I type it as fast as I can on a variety of devices, don't bother proofreading anything, and move on. Slashdot comments replace reading the newspaper on the crapper. if grammar for this activity is something you even concider, apple, then you are the exact loser I'm talking about. and now I flush your brother down the toilet.
You've been on the crapper for nearly 5 hours. I suggest you consult a doctor, or a mortician.
One fact about humans.
They don't take responsibility for their actions, and they lie hard about accidents and try to place blame elsewhere.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Ugh, really? I am concerned about all these things that just add failure modes (will the car only operate in limp-home mode if there is a problem with the auto-brake system?), raise barriers to entry for new vehicle companies, and remove incentives for people to have situational awareness (couple with failure modes - if people are used to auto brake, so don't pay attention, then there is a problem with auto brake, what happens?).
That last one is probably the most concerning to me - people these days have so little situational awareness as it is...
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
News flash, all you click bait web sites.
Autopilot is driver assist, not autonomous driving.
It's like cruise control except a little smarter.
Those of us who have it understand that.
The crooked media with all their bias, payola and agenda won't say that.
Well, not that shocked.
User error again, so the SEC investigation is unwarranted. Why are they not investigating GM for covering up the fatal ignition switch problems, or Toyota for their safety issues, or VW for cheating emissions tests across VW and Audi vehicle lines?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
In response to the third reported Autopilot crash, which was the first of three where there were no fatalities
The first crash in Florida was the guy who got killed going under the truck while watching his DVD. .
The second crash was a gallery owner in Detroit and he and his passenger survived without any injuries
The third crash - the one apparently without autopilot - hit a guard rail in Montana. "The two occupants walked away without major injuries."
I don't know why this "fatalities in two crashes" myth is so pernicious. It was also falsely claimed in this Slashdot story on the third crash last Monday. But all of the linked articles are absolutely clear that there's been only one fatality, so it's not like the various submitters are just getting bad information from the media. Instead, the Subbys appear to be making up the second fatality out of nothing.
A more skeptical person than me would wonder if someone shorted TSLA.
"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
According to TFS, Elon Musk believes if the autopilot was active it would have prevented this accident from happening.
So let's just take his word for that. Driver makes an error and causes a crash that autopilot would have prevented, while driving a car that has the autopilot function installed and in good working order but the driver decided to operate the car fully manually.
We have cars with technologies like traction control, anti-lock braking, assisted braking/steering options, there are various collision prevention options - technologies that are active at all times, and the driver may not even have the option to switch it off. Now there is an accident which autopilot could have prevented, but it didn't.
Should autopilot, even when disabled by the driver and not actively driving the car, always be alert and step in to prevent these accidents? And - as direct follow up - could or even should we blame Tesla for not leaving autopilot in standby acting as a driver's assistant?
1. Driver thought autopilot was on, since it wasn't, it crashed.
or
2. Telsa is trying to cover it up by saying it was off because it is looking bad for autopilot with all the crashes.
No. No one died because of technology. People died because they are not using the technology correctly. Tesla let the drivers know that the tech was in beta, Telsa let the drivers know to pay attention and still be alert and able to take control if the system fails to do exactly what it failed to do.
And *that* is a human factors engineering problem. Here you have a system which allows the driver to pay less attention *and* it expects the driver to take over in an emergency? That combines the worst of two separate systems.
I think the statistic for auto-brake last I saw was an estimated 14 billion Euros a year in savings from crashes that not longer happen. That is a lot and I mean a lot of money to be saving and there was a not insignificant number of lives to be saved as well. Basically the return on investment is significantly greater than one, so it is a no brainer really.
Of course it's not so good if you are an auto crash repair company or on the organ transplant waiting list, but that is the old buggy whip problem.
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.
This is all well and good, and correct, but also totally irrelevant to the point at hand. Tesla has admitted many many times, and states so in their documentation and EULA, that 'Autopilot' is in beta. If it's in beta then it's not ready for public use. By definition, it has testing and improvement to go before it's 'good enough' to be out in public, otherwise it wouldn't be called 'beta'.
There are many things that are not perfect but are beyond beta and therefore ready for public use. Most of the existing tech in pretty much anything isn't perfect, but it isn't beta either. Autopilot in aeroplanes is absolutely not perfect, but it's not beta.
The point is that Tesla's response to issues with Autopilot is always 'the driver needs to remain alert because the system is in beta and not complete'. In that case, it shouldn't be in the hands of the public. It should still be in closed testing like the Google car. When it finally gets to 'good enough' (and it's clearly, objectively, not there yet simply going by the kind of failure it experienced, and Tesla's own statements as to its effectiveness and 'beta' state), then it can be released and further refined.
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.
How the hell does this point of view get upmodded? You're basically saying that if the driver fails and causes an accident, it's the drivers fault. If the system fails and causes an accident, it's still the drivers fault?
You're saying that, no matter what happens, it can never be the system's fault.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
yeah, I'm the moron for thinking grandmar is useless for somewhere random people post random opinions while on the shitter. that does excuse it for me, and the fact that I think so makes me stupid in your sad little opinion? good thing your opinion is not relevant, and the people of this planet laugh at your loser self just like they laughed at you in school, until you got behind a keyboard and hid behind the keyboard. now you attack while in the real world you don't have the balls to walk up to a hot girl and say hi, and be interesting, relaxing, and entertaining, and fuck her later? I understand, you watch porn instead of sex, you don't need to talk to them, you can stick your dick in a rubber tube instead. fucking. loser. ha ha ha. too bad for normal people this is just a place they go to on the shitter instead of the newspaper.
now here's what makes you a moron, non-subjectively, using your own rules. you're a stickler for grammer and shit? ok - here's what you attacked the guy about: "should of" instead of "should have". did you not even give this 2 seconds of thought before writing? I don't give 2 seconds of though to my posts, but that's because I'm on the toilet and I don't care what I write. you however do, and by your own rules, you're a loser even in your fake internet universe.
even a retard can see that "should of" is a substitution for "should've" not "should have" like you said. people pronounce "should've" as "should of" in regular language, something we use when talking to other people, because it's easier to pronounce, so we pronounce it a little different. "dve" is hard to pronounce while "dof" is easier to pronounce. then some people write it as it sounds. this is not because they don't know that "should've" is the proper contraction for "should have". it's because they don't pay any fucking attention, and they're talking to someone while typing the post, while music is playing, and they're thinking "what should I have for lunch" at the same time. mistakes will be made - the only one who cares is you. it's your chance to point out someone's mistake, and use that to say you're better than them. except here it's not a mistake, it's irrelevant, despite of what you say or what rules you make for others. you don't get to make rules - you're just some random looser who decided the comments section must have proper grammer, kelsey. but you can't decide that for others - we don't give a fuck about you or your opinion. you post correctly and proofread, and correct before submitting. by the time you're done with that, I'm already talking to the hot girl at the bar. you keep sitting at your computer though, it's all good.
it saves no characters - you said it saves two. you are not only a loser, you are the idiot, by your own rules.
The point of my statement was that the driver is supposed to be able to respond in emergency situations and not rely upon the autopilot. I didn't say there couldn't be a problem with the autopilot, just that the onus is on the driver.
Any articles? I couldn't seem to find anything other than this one that says crashes are reduced by 38%, but there were no cost figures.
That said, I don't think it's a buggy-whip problem: 14B Euro per year might be correct, but I don't think it's a win for society in monetary terms - I'd question the assertion that the return on investment is greater than one.
For example, the mandate in the US for rear back-up camera costs society about $25 million per life saved, because it's a couple hundred bucks times several million cars, to save only a couple hundred lives - which is on the order of billions. Given US GDP per-capita is only about $53k, society is losing money there - 80 years times $53k is only about $4.25M, so society is paying at least 5 times the average monetary value of a life* to save one. Now I used something close to life expectancy; it's worse if you only consider working-age years (which is what, 50 years or so?).
It is indeed sad when accidents cost lives, but we passed the point in vehicle safety where the incremental cost of accidents avoided exceeds the losses of the accidents themselves (in aggregate of course - there may be individual accidents which cost more).
*It's sadly harsh, but society has to think of things on economic cost at this scale. Put another way: nobody sensible would pay $100 for an insurance policy that only pays out $20, but that's kind of what mandated automobile safety features does these days.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Basically if you agree to the ToS you are telling Tesla - go ahead and experiment on me I won't sue you. If you are not interested in doing that don't use the functionality. I bet the first gentleman who was killed by the trailer very much subscribed to this philosophy because he was genuinely interested and intrigued by the technology and what it could do. He took the chance and paid a price... hopefully he paid it gladly but he knew what he was doing and the risk he was taking because he posted a near miss video on you tube and as per the articles around him he was genuinely proud of his Tesla.
If this guy on the other hand is trying to blame autopilot for his own mistake then he should not get a chance to spoil it for everyone else.
Linkedin http://in.linkedin.com/in/robinsaikatchatterjee
Consumer Reports is calling on Tesla to "disable hands-free operation until its system can be made safer."
I'm calling on some drivers to disable hands-on operation until they can be made safer drivers.