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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
Apparently brakes were not applied. They believe it was a combination of the trailer being a solid light gray color that tended to visually blend in with the sky, coupled with the radar being designed to ignore large flat signs that cross above the road. So the trailer managed to be filtered out as an hazard and was ignored by the software.
Better known as 318230.
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.
Forgot to mention. The car instructions say AutoPilot is not to be used where there are crossroads. In the Florida instance in question there were crossroads.
Why does this one death cause everyone to panic?
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
I remember reading something from Tesla saying they found autopilot was not on, and had it been it would have stopped the car.
Different incident. There have been three in recent weeks. This is the fatality, where autopilot was on, didn't detect the truck, and the jackass was watching a Harry Potter DVD in the driver's seat. Hopefully he didn't have children, for their sake and for ours, so no one has lost their father and we get a Darwin Award nominee.
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.
So, did the truck turn in front of oncoming traffic? If so, why is this the Tesla's fault?
It's a Cruise-Control-like system so I would assume it goes at the speed that the driver sets it at and then seeks to keep that speed. 74mph is 1mph under 10 over, which everybody knows is the 'real' speed limit and I bet is a common setting for people using Cruise-Control.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur. . . . . . . .
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.
The machines are already trying to kill us all - *runs away screaming*
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.
Cruise control is different from Auto Pilot.
And despite being modded down for mentioning it - the whole concept behind this is the car is supposed to be controlling itself. Giving time for the pilot to go to the lavatory and stuff.
At least that's the perception people getting killed by it think it is.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
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.
I think obstacles that are empty below 3 ft confuse the car.
http://bgr.com/2016/05/11/tesla-model-s-summon-crash/
I have also heard of the car running into 1/2 open garage doors.
That does explain the nasty looks I get because I stick to the posted speed limit.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
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.
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.
However, can we all agree that it is also incredible stupidity on Tesla's part to call this "Autopilot"?
As a Tesla owner, I do not agree. Tesla makes it abundantly clear what the capabilities and limitations are. Nobody that is actually using it has been misled.
Had they been going zero, they would not have died.
If they had been going zero, they would have died before they reached their destination.
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.
Apparently brakes were not applied. They believe it was a combination of the trailer being a solid light gray color that tended to visually blend in with the sky, coupled with the radar being designed to ignore large flat signs that cross above the road. So the trailer managed to be filtered out as an hazard and was ignored by the software.
If the trailer had adhered to european safety regulation it would have at least side rails under to prevent cars being stuck underneath it. Not only would it have saved the car's driver it would also prevent the trailer from being detected as sign.
So the road under the truck looked clear (sort of)
If only the autopilot system had been calibrated to take into account the exact height of the Tesla's roof. If that had been done, then there would have been no accident in this case (the Tesla would have stopped until the truck was out of the way), but when encountering a somewhat higher truck, the Tesla would pass cleanly underneath it, with the driver probably never even noticing what had happened. And that would have been rather awesome.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.
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.
Lucky you're not in Australia.. I have been booked (via hidden camera) for doing 64km/h in a 60km/h zone (39.8mph in a 37.2 zone).
Police generally will pull you over if you're doing 10km/h over the limit (6.2 mph) as the fine doubles at that point.
15km/h over (9.3mph) triples the fine.
And I'm not just talking about police on traffic duty - any police car will pull you over if you're speeding.
If you get caught doing 25km/h over (15.5mph) that's an immediate loss of license.
Our highway / freeway limits (apart from some isolated stretches on interstate highways) are all 100km/h (62mph).
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
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.
Look at the way the trailer took the top of the car off while barely slowing it down. This shows how trailer under-run bars would have prevented this death. In Europe they are required, and we basically don't have this sort of side collision decapitation horror accident.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
"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.
I'm not so sure that a simple software fix can fix it. Some key notes:
Eastbound. Afternoon. May. Aka, the sun was right behind him. Clear and bright outside. This is a perfect recipe for light-colored objects ahead to be overexposed, against other overexposed objects, potentially including the road and the sky. If you have a big block of RGB(255,255,255), how do you determine the boundaries? The best you can do is recognize that it's a threat and disable autopilot, while warning the driver.
A more appropriate solution, if this was indeed the case, would be a hardware fix: read the *raw* data from the camera. A potential alternative, if the frame exposure time can be adjusted, would be to read out alternating short and long exposure frames and combine them.
Fox: "I think we should call it... your grave!" Cast: "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"
...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.