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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."
I never heard about people being that stupid when cruise control was introduced into the mainstream. Autopilot, as it stands, is a smarter form of cruise control (it basically helps you maintain the speed without your foot on the pedal but it's a bit fancier than a fixed speed)
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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.
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.
This seems like exactly the sort of situation lane assist should handle. And if "auto pilot" was engaged, shouldn't it have prevented the driver from following too closely, as Musk is implying was the case?
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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.
You're driving it wrong.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
You have no idea what an autopilot's function and limitations are, so quit pretending that you do. FYI, an autopilot will merrily fly your plane into a brick wall if there is a brick wall at your altitude on the course you tell it to steer.
God help us from people who make up their own conception of what terms mean. It;s no crime to be ignorant, but pretending you know it all when you know nothing about the subject is just presumptuous and silly.
Training is not going to help. it's just not in human nature to pay attention when there's nothing to do most of the time, and it must be assumed that the driver will require at least a couple of seconds warning, and probably more, before being able to take control. It is highly irresponsible of auto manufacturers to field systems that cannot reliably give that warning, even though it is technically the driver's responsibility to pay attention. Tesla's habit of calling it beta software is a cynical attempt to avoid responsibility, which may come back to haunt them, as it shows they know the system is not ready.
I've always had a hard time visualizing an intermediate step between fully automatic and fully manual driving; and it appears that's coming true.
Drive a car with antilock brakes in slippery conditions.
When it kicks the bottom of your foot to indicate it's working, you will be able to visualize the intermediate step.
"a device that steers a ship, aircraft, or spacecraft in place of a person" -- Merriam-Webster
Gee, how could anyone be confused about that?
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
You can't expect people to know more about autopilots. The person you replied to is marked as a troll bit she is just saying waht every non-nerd would say. Therefore I wonder how long Tesla will still get away with their 'but in the fine print it says...' rethoric.
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Self-driving cars would be a great improvement, but, as Tesla keeps saying, these are not self-driving cars.
They are a step in that direction, and full SDCs will be only a software upgrade. All the necessary hardware is already in current Teslas. The risk of rushing the technology is far, far smaller than the risk of impeding it. America needs to stop being the "can't do" country.
Thousands of people die because of stupid, careless driving.
Encouraging you to rely on a system not capable of detecting and avoiding a car that the human in front of you managed to avoid? That's encouraging stupid and careless driving.
The stats don't add up at the moment because not many people have these things, not everyone that does has this shit turned on, and not everyone who turns this shit on is an idiot. But those are all factors that change radically as it becomes mainstream.
Notice that it's always Tesla, and none of the other manufacturers of cars are getting as bad a press even though my car bought this year had options for lane assist, auto-braking cruise control, and so on. Because they DO NOT encourage you to just let the car drive. Tesla does. Even if they say they don't, calling it what they call it implies it can do things that it can't.
Why do you think the other manufacturers are avoiding that exact thing, when they could easily claim to have the same or superior technology in their cars right now? Why do you think they steer clear of any terminology like that? Why do you think they are all testing it, all using it, but none of them are making any kind of claim about it, or getting anywhere near as much bad press?
It's not the technology. We're a tech site here, we love technology. It's the inappropriate use of technology and encouraging reliance on something that's not perfect.
And, still, legally and ultimately this driver is at fault - Tesla can't take responsibility because their system just isn't good enough to do so. They have to blame the customer. But their customer is saying that the exact feature that's supposed to avoid accidents that they don't notice isn't working. How, with all the fancy tech that Tesla claim to have, was it possible to come into contact with another car at all? Ignoring whose fault it was, who should have had their hand on the wheel, etc. Tesla are saying that their system DIDN'T manage to do what they advertise it can do (even if they can discourage reliance on it, legally speaking).
There was an obstacle, a large obstacle, a visible and detectable obstacle, and nobody is saying this guy was going too fast, or the other guy was going the wrong way down a motorway or anything out of the ordinary. He drove past a car, and the system didn't detect it, and he hit it. Given Tesla's love of this new feature they are selling, how is that possible?
It's possible because the Tesla self-drive / auto-drive / drive-assist feature DIDN'T SPOT THE OBSTACLE, DIDN'T APPLY THE BRAKES IN TIME and therefore DIDN'T DO WHAT IT CLAIMS. This is just one isolated incident, maybe, and maybe the guy was too close (as others have pointed out, why didn't the drive assist increase the gap?), too fast or too stupid in his actions. But the thing didn't do what it needed to.
Extrapolate that to millions of idiotic drivers like there are on the road, millions of such events every day, millions of unexpected cars and obstacles, and it's a potential disaster. And Tesla want to be able to just say "Oh, well, you shouldn't have relied on us", effectively. It's not a good sales technique!
If this tech is to become mainstream, it has to get better a lot quicker, because still the issues of liability are there. If the car is capable of NOT taking action, it's also capable of taking INCORRECT action, and that's just going to open up all kinds of avenues where people will say their car did something that they never intended.
And as these cars age, the system isn't going to improve in capability. As these cars get more prevalent, the number of problems is going to increase. And as people see more of them and get more reliant on them (I've never seen a Tesla on the road in my country, and some models appear to cost FIVE TIMES what my brand-new 2016-model large family car cost, so I don't imagine there are many about and people are being "careful" with them at the moment).
It's not a question of holding back tech. I'm a techie, I love it. It's a question of how that tech is sold ("Hey, this car drives itself!" even if they say they never say that) and how it's handled when things go wrong ("Driver error for relying on us, not our problem").
What's the deal? This stopped being "news" after the first two.
All the stories are alike:
1. Driver engages "autopilot"
2. Driver takes hands off wheel / stops paying attention to the road.
3. Driver crashes; blames "autopilot" instead of own stupidity.
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.
To do something on autopilot to mean "without thinking" has been an idiom much longer than Tesla has used it. This is not some kind of unexpected misunderstanding.
Etymology: based on the literal meaning of automatic pilot (a system that flies a plane without human effort)
There are many less boasting terms like adaptive cruise control, lane assist etc. that could have been used and have been used by other car companies. They picked autopilot because it sounds new and revolutionary. He's a perfect illustration of the impression Tesla's marketing division wanted to give, while the execs call it beta (as in, will be self-driving soon we're just knocking out a few bugs) and their legal department provides the disclaimers. And disclaimer are everywhere for legal CYA, like if you read your average EULA the software is not usable for anything. That's not what people really expect, even if that's what it says.
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I think you severely underestimate what constitutes a commercial aircraft.
How is any person who has never flown supposed to know how an autopilot works, really? I mean, is it really that difficult to comprehend that some people who are not pilots might be under the wrong impression about what it is like to fly a freaking airplane? That's what makes it a bad term from the start, it doesn't even matter if the name is accurate or not.
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Turkish Airlines 1951, Amsterdam 25 february 2009.
Automatic approach, radio altimeter failure let the autopilot think it was just above the runway while it was in fact still at 2000 ft above the ground. Autopilot commanded throttles to idle, airspeed dropped to stall speed, plane crashed.
The verdict: pilot error. They should have reacted to the dropping airspeed by taking control, pushing the throttles forward and initiating a go-around.
There are plenty of other examples where autopilots have flown aircraft into mountains or done other stupid things yet the pilots took the blame (rightfully so) because they should have seen what was happening and taken over.
We don't actually have our hands at the controls during most of the flight because with sufficient altitude there's rarely a situation where you have to immediately take over in a fraction of a second. The air is pretty empty. At low altitudes, however, even when the autopilot is on, we are required to be ready to take over at any time.
And why doesn't Tesla simply call it, "Cruise Control Plus" or something catchy like that instead of giving people the wrong idea?
What the actual fuck? Cruise control does not steer. Distance-sensitive cruise control is cruise control plus. This is something else entirely. Something which controls heading and speed but which does not take complete responsibility for the vehicle. And do you know what we call a device like that? We call it an autopilot. You want Tesla to use a shit name that is less descriptive than what they are using now, and you'd call it an improvement. That's stupid bullshit. Don't be stupid, or bullshit.
Every single suggestion from a slashdotter as to what to call this feature is actually more confusing than autopilot, including yours. Buy a fucking dictionary, and spend some time with it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The name is not the problem - if it was, it could easily be fixed. The problem is human nature - even well–intentioned people find it difficult to pay attention when, most of the time, they do not have to. This is not driven by the name, it is driven by experience.
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.