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Tesla Model S In Fatal Autopilot Crash Was Going 74 MPH In a 65 Zone, NTSB Says (latimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Los Angeles Times: The Tesla car involved in a fatal crash in Florida this spring was in Autopilot mode and going about 10 miles faster than the speed limit, according to safety regulators, who also released a picture of the mangled vehicle. Earlier reports had stated the Tesla Model S struck a big rig while traveling on a divided highway in central Florida, and speculated that the Tesla Autopilot system had failed to intervene in time to prevent the collision. The National Transportation Safety Board released a preliminary report Tuesday that confirms some details of the May 7 collision, along with a photo that shows the car with its windshield flattened and most of its roof sheared off. The federal agency also included a photo of the big rig, circling an area on the right side of the tractor-trailer that showed the light damage the truck received from the collision. The 2015 Model S was moving at 74 mph, above the posted 65 mph speed limit, when it struck a 53-foot trailer being pulled by a Freightliner Cascadia truck. Tesla's semi-autonomous Autopilot driving feature was engaged, the report says.
I typically drive 10 mph over the posted speed limit, both on freeways and on roads. IMHO, the posted speed limit is for either A) the driver with dementia who shouldn't be driving anyway, or B) some government that needs the speeding fines to balance their budget.
// please don't run over my cat
Go Los Angeles and there are some freeway offramps marked 25 MPH and, goddamit, they farking mean it oh holy shit will I make it. But as time goes on those honest speed limits get replaced with better intersections, but the speed limit stays the same.
Freeway speed limits should be 80. Non freeway speeds should be a good 10 MPH over what they are already.
/ my comment doesn't count for the road in front of my house
Traditional cruise control allows you to pick a constant speed, so I would expect it at least can do that. I would also expect the car has no way to know the posted speed limit of the road, thus the driver controls the speed of the car (that said, we have most of the pieces needed to make that work, and in fact I bet self-driving cars in testing do this, but for "semi-autonomous" I expect it's not worth the trouble to implement since any way you do it you need a bunch of extra equipment on the car to figure out what the speed limit is, which makes the feature more expensive... or the user can just set the proper speed himself for free.)
In the end it's the driver who is responsible for the actions of his car, as far as he can control them. The only things I can see wrong with autopilot with everything I've heard so far is the name, which may tempt a driver to assume it does more than it actually does, and the fact that giving a driver less things to concentrate on while driving can be dangerous in some cases if they still need to be able to react.
Why does this one death cause everyone to panic?
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
No I get it - my point is how can you call this an "autopilot" if it doesn't even read road signs or figure out speed limits from GPS location or something. It's more of a "tries keep the car in your lane" device. I know it's just a detail, but lawyers have won lawsuits for less.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
and slows or stops if the vehicle in front of you decelerates.
But not, apparently, if a brick wall suddenly appears in front of you. Yes I agree that "autopilot" is a horrendous choice of name because "auto" and "automatic" imply autonomy, no matter how many clickthrough EULA's you shove in front of someone. I'm all in favor of Tesla but Musk should have realized that people can be really, really, REALLY stupid and this system needed to be idiot-tested a lot more before being released. I don't think an EULA or even a signed contract will save him when people have died.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I've never seen a cruise control system that would obey the speed limit when deliberately set above it by the driver.
Learn to love Alaska
I think people are missing a rather big point here.
The NTSB is investigating the accident, and will post a reasonably fair and accurate assessment of what happened.
Tesla will make some changes to ensure that this type of accident is avoided in the future, and push at the next update.
All teslas will become safer because of the analysis. In effect, the collective software will have "learned" from a mistake and corrected. This is not something that the driver of a fatal accident can do, nor other non-involved drivers.
With enough data, enough mistakes and near-mistakes corrected, the software will quickly evolve to be safer than any human driver.
From a machine-learning perspective, this has enormous benefits.
More than 'sort of'. Look at the photo of the car after the crash.
It's almost entirely intact with minor damage if you ignore the roof!
Very easy to see how the car thought it was clear - it technically was up to about a meter/4 feet above the road.
"Not to be used where there are crossroads, trucks painted a light color or other vehicles of any kind."
This is Elon Musk's "You're holding it wrong!" moment.
You are welcome on my lawn.
As long as you stay in the slow-poke lane, we can be BFFs.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The only problem with the terminology is that there is a disconnect between what the common person on the street thinks the capabilities of an autopilot is versus its actual capabilities. An actual autopilot is not much more than an airplane cruise control that maintains a preset altitude, heading, and airspeed, while the common perception is that it is essentially an autonomous robot pilot that can do everything up to and including dogfighting while the human pilot takes a nap.
It's 2016 not 1916, there are consumer safety laws now, you can't get away with "it's your own damned fault, you were doing it wrong" anymore.
See, that's the problem with people. We honestly need to expect a certain level of competency from people. There is something to be said for safety features, but you need to set an expectation on the user as well. You cannot expect the company to cover for every possible idiot.
We honestly need to expect a certain level of competency from people.
No. We honestly need to expect a certain level of competency from ENGINEERS. People are allowed to be stupid. Way back in the days of the first air-brakes, they used air pressure to apply the brakes. What happened when the system failed and air pressure was lost? The brakes failed. Nowadays you design a system where you need air pressure to REMOVE the brake. Now if your system fails, the brakes are applied - orders of magnitude safer than no brakes. Electrical devices are grounded. Commercial jets can fly with only a single engine. Etc.
Fail safes are necessary because the universe and people don't always co-operate. So when the shit hits the fan, you try to kill as few people as possible. Just hacking something together and throwing it out to the public isn't good enough - that's irresponsible design. If a guy kills himself with your product you need to be able to show that he went to extreme lengths to do so.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Stupid people are why my daughter's scooter has a single warning label on it: THIS PRODUCT MOVES WHEN USED.
People are in an automobile that doesn't drive itself, but for some reason think an autopilot will let them sleep during the trip. It's a sad part of reality that people with enough money to buy a Tesla can be so stupid as to not listen to any instruction or learn about the unique features of their purchase. Darwin Award indeed.
Why does this one death cause everyone to panic?
Who has panicked? Unless by "panic" you meant "engage in intense debate about the potential risks and rewards of a new and relatively unproven technology", but that's not a very common definition of that word.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
"if a brick wall suddenly appears in front of you."
It wasn't sudden. Look at the scene photos and the impact points on the vehicles. There were clear sight lines and the truck had to pull out over half it's length, which was quite a distance and trucks aren't exactly fast accelerators.
The crash avoidance system simply either didn't see the siltation developing from far enough away, or didn't recognise the situation as dangerous for many reasons that have to do with the limitations of the sensors used. Volvo had previously said that those sensors weren't good enough in all situations, and being the manufacturer with the most R&D into safety, and a history of sharing safety technologies and design guidelines with competing manufacturers, I'm inclined to believe them.
If the Tesla had a LIDAR system installed, it is entirely possible that this accident could have been avoided. Likewise if the driver had been paying attention the accident may have been avoided. However there is lots of research that shows that if people are merely passive monitors of technology, their attention wanders and their reaction times slow, so this situation was entirely predictable, and probably inevitable with the current Auto Pilot system as it stands today.
You either need to give the driver more to do, or need to be able to handle more situations automatically, which is the problem with Auto Pilot. It's in a kind of uncanny valley of driver assistance. It provides enough assistance, most of the time, that the driver starts to rely on it, but doesn't handle enough edge cases to be worthy of this trust when the driver needs it most.
No. We honestly need to expect a certain level of competency from ENGINEERS. People are allowed to be stupid.
People can be as stupid or drunk or tired or half-blind as they like, LICENSED DRIVERS who operate two tons of metal travelling at 70+ mph need to take some damn responsibility for that. Thankfully he only won a Darwin award but if he'd killed somebody I'd call that a clear case of vehicular manslaughter which can land you in prison for a very long time. Drivers that can't do their part should hand in their license and wait for the real self-driving cars.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A car is a dangerous machine and risk should be measured in a similar way and minimized. If you are going to put an "autopilot" into a vehicle then you must first a) ensure it works as intended, and b) ensures / forces driver attentiveness just in case you're wrong about a). If both these conditions are met then the car should be safer than a driver by themselves and the risk is minimized. If a) doesn't work as intended and b) the human is away with the fairies then you get a fatal road collision.
This is a forseeable consequence of a bad design and Tesla have enjoyed the bad press that goes with it. And yes "autopilot" is a misleading term that only compounds the risk.
How would the car have been able to do this? The radar used does not have any vertical resolution, you only get a certain proportion of the radar that is returned, similar to what you get from a overhead sign. The camera would have been able to see the size of the gap but it did not detect the truck either as it was the same colour as the sky.
"Waiting for a tesla to drive through a large pane of glass...."
As opposed to human drivers, who are known to masterfully avoid all those frequent large panes of glass that suddenly appear on your way while you are driving on the highway.
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong." (Oscar Wilde)
It's not just the one guy behind you, it's also the entire line of people going reasonable speeds behind him. There's also the chance the guy you're passing will speed up as you attempt to overtake, resulting in you two slowpokes creating a wall. *That* is when the guy behind you will tailgate. As the guy in the passing lane it's your job to break the stalemate, either by committing to the pass and speeding up, or "cancelling" and slowing down to go behind the other slowpoke. Otherwise, you create a far more dangerous situation than exceeding the speed limit would create.
...yes, because of the possibility that someone may cross in front of you when they don't have right of way, like this truck. It was a typical rural US Highway grade crossing intersection, and the truck was turning left onto a side road. The road was long and straight, and as I remember from looking at it on street view, it wasn't hilly, either, and it was daylight, so the truck driver should have had a good view of the oncoming car.
I don't know why the truck driver's part is ignored so much. Well, I know, really, it's because that's so boring that it's not news. If the oncoming car hadn't been a Tesla, but had instead been an ordinary tired driver, none of this would have gone beyond local news.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I love this topic because I always get to mention the Autobahn. No speed limit and half the traffic fatalities per mile as US interstates, all because the slower people keep right, and allow the faster people to just pass.
I freely admit I generally exceed the speed limit (although usually by more like 5MPH), and I get annoyed when we have five or more lanes through our city and people are driving below the limit in the center and left of center lanes. Someone is in the "proper" lane if they are generally passing people to their right and being passed on the left. At the same time, I don't feel like I should have to get over and go slower so that the person behind me can exceed the limit even more than I am. If it's not going to slow me down, I have no issue moving over to allow a faster driver to pass. I promise you - if you want to go faster than I'm going, I really don't want to be in your way, but you have to give me reasonable time to pass the people I'm passing.
The problem is most people hate being passed, and think the people passing are jerks (instead of simply not caring, which we should all do more of - worry about yourself). I think it has to do with transactional analysis. I often drive in off-peak hours, and use cruise control (not autopilot!) because it actually helps me pay more attention to the road without worrying about driving a consistent speed.
It's true that it seems like people will speed up when passing.... and often slow down after they pass you. What I've observed is that it's almost always the person being passed speeding up. They may not even realize they're doing it - it's probably only millimeters of difference on the accelerator, and then they complain the person passing them slowed down. The vast majority of the time I'm passing people - using cruise control - they speed up to match. Maybe they feel like if they are being passed then they are going too slow. I think more often people just don't like "losing" the social interaction with others on the roadway. All I know is that it ends up causing a lot more traffic problems because you then create rolling roadblocks, causing people to have to change more lanes to go around. For me, I'll often speed up some more - and if they speed up to match, I'll drop back to my original speed and get behind them... at which point they generally slow down. Quite frustrating, but I don't want to be the person blocking traffic.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Oh? Please tell me how a bunch of people doing the same speed creates a dangerous situation.
For the record I agree unless you're overtaking don't be in the lane.
But on the flip side the overtaking lane is not a lane designed for the express purpose of breaking the law, so if you're going faster than the LEGAL LIMIT, you have zero right to complain as the cause of any unsafe scenario is actually yourself.