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Tesla Owner In China Blames Autopilot For Crash (usatoday.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today: The owner of a Tesla Motors Model S sedan in China reportedly said his vehicle crashed into a car on the side of the road while the vehicle's Autopilot system was engaged, but the automaker said the driver was using the system improperly. Luo Zhen, 33, of Beijing told Reuters that his vehicle collided with a parked car on the left side of a highway, damaging both vehicles but injuring no one. He criticized Tesla sales people for allegedly describing the vehicle as "self-driving." "The impression they give everyone is that this is self-driving, this isn't assisted driving," he told Reuters. In the new case in China, Tesla said the Model S was "following closely behind the car in front of it when the lead car moved to the right to avoid hitting the parked car." "The driver of the Tesla, whose hands were not detected on the steering wheel, did not steer to avoid the parked car and instead scraped against its side," Tesla said Wednesday in a statement. "As clearly communicated to the driver in the vehicle, Autosteer is an assist feature that requires the driver to keep his hands on the steering wheel at all times, to always maintain control and responsibility for the vehicle, and to be prepared to take over at any time."
That really needs LIDAR.
We get it, Musk will blame the driver for not avoiding the collision, yeh yeh EULAs etc. But that doesn't fix the problem. That visual system does not work faultlessly, it is just diffing the two scenes to try to determine a 3D world view, and it clearly does not 'see' the world, it sees the deltas as the car moves. So they need to add LIDAR so it can see objects distances without trying to determine them with time deltas.
From my understanding of driving conditions in China, it would take a pretty miraculous AI to prevent accidents there. It seems as though these driving assists and self-driving cars are going to have to be region-specific.
its more fancy lane assets and you never hear of people crashing there Prius and blaming its lane assest.
The have a sensor tha detects if hands are on the wheel.
They say auto pilot should always be used with hands on wheel.
Why don't they just disable it if you take you hands from the wheel?
You are a perfect illustration of the problem Tesla faces. You think you know what an airplane's autopilot does, based solely on the name, but you have no real clue.
Some, not all, modern autopilots in airplanes can land an airplane provided the the airport is a Cat IIIb or Cat IIIc; i.e.: they require a fair bit of active infrastructure on the airport. In other situations, or with the rest of the installed autopilots in the world, they will only assist the pilot in keeping the planes attitude and heading.
Yet whenever an airplane - be it a small private plane or a passenger jet - crashes when on autopilot, no one is suggesting the pilot is free of blame...
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Meanwhile, over a thousand people per day are dying in traffic accidents worldwide. SDCs likely could prevent most of those. You want that progress held up because, what, 3 people have died in a year? Get some sense of perspective.
Name one autopilot & vehicle that totally the vehicle's operator of all responsibility and need to be attentive.
You won't be able to, because none exist. An autopilot is a (useful) tool to reduce your workload. But it's not Knight Rider. You can't just get in, say "KITT, take me to KSMO", and sit back and go to sleep / read a book / get drunk. Autopilots have never worked that way. And no one, not even Tesla, has advertised them as such.
Imagine all the people...
Auto-pilot is Musk's "you're driving it wrong" moment.
In theory you should sit there, fully attentive, hands on the wheel, ready to jump in with a fraction of a second's warning to avert a crash. In reality, human beings don't work that way.
There are videos on YouTube of people asleep at the wheel with AP on. One hand resting on the wheel to keep the AP active. You can call them reckless, but as an engineer you have to take human nature and our inability to concentrate for long periods when here is little to do into account.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"Buy our new car with DrivesItself* technology"
And then in small-print:
*car does not actually drive itself.
See the problem? Just change the fecking name.
And promotional material is skimmed by the very first owner only. You can put all the crap you like in there, it's still misleading to name it Autopilot.
It's like saying you don't need a childproof medicine lid as long as you have the warning **Keep out of reach of children**.
I have no children, no children ever come into my home, but I do have rheumatism and childproof lids are also arth1proof. When the local pharmacy no longer provided easy-open lids, I switched pharmacies.
I shouldn't have to pay a price in pain because other people can't keep meds and spawn apart.
Options are good. Individual responsibility too.
The tricky problem about this technology is that it is aimed at taking the burden away from what is required to be able to take over. At least, most people perceive it that way at first. Proper training is required and you know what? In the end, it requires more concentration to watch on standby ready to take over than manually driving the car yourself.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
"Buy our new car with DrivesItself* technology"
That would be OK if Autopilot meant drives itself. But it doesn't. It doesn't mean anything close to that. The only time it gets vaguely close is when you're talking about a boat, but that's true only when the sun is shining and the birds are chirping, not when the weather is going sideways. In planes, the pilot is explicitly required to remain at the controls and alert while the autopilot is in use, and is responsible for control if the autopilot should fail or otherwise perform in an unsatisfactory manner.
And promotional material is skimmed by the very first owner only. You can put all the crap you like in there, it's still misleading to name it Autopilot.
It isn't. It's exactly analogous to an autopilot. They didn't call it self-drive, which is what you're asserting. But personal responsibility doesn't fit into your narrative, because you would like your ass wiped for you. The world of Wall-E is coming, but you won't be able to afford a ticket.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
" In the end, it requires more concentration to watch on standby ready to take over than manually driving the car yourself."
Exactly, Telsa is being disingenuous (and reckless).
Tesla Says: ... ..."
... anything ... that involves glancing somewhere not on the road in front of them, and involves moving one or both hands from the wheel?
"
"As clearly communicated to the driver in the vehicle, Autosteer is an assist feature that requires the driver to keep his hands on the steering wheel at all times, to always maintain control and responsibility for the vehicle, and to be prepared to take over at any time."
Now, I hesitate to say this out loud, as this is a Nerd website, but this instruction is beyond silly. There is zero chance any human with a working brain is going to adhere to this instruction, and although I understand how it comes to be, it's a testament to a lack of even basic comprehension of a User Interface that is so unfortunately common amongst the nerdy citizens of the world.
Let's imagine this instruction in use. I'm driving my so-equipped vehicle:
Situation: Nothing unusual happening. Both hands on the wheel, Mind and Body attentive to the road. Alert and ready at any moment to take over from the auto driver. Car driving itself.
Repeat every second of a 20 minute commute for a thousand days. Or three days.
Now, what human, in possession of the faculties required to actually have a paying job and a drivers' license, is not going to become bored with this scenario, and at some point do something
And, after testing the waters, so to speak, and not dying in a fiery crash, won't do it again, only for a bit longer and perhaps with hands much further from said wheel and eyes much removed from the road ahead?
There cannot be a "half-way" system, such as that installed in the Tesla S, that drives, but does not drive, the car. It simply won't work in the manner the instructions say it should work.