Slashdot Mirror
Mobileye Says Tesla Was Dropped Because of Safety Concerns
An anonymous reader writes: On Wednesday, Mobileye revealed that it ended its relationship with Tesla because "it was pushing the envelope in terms of safety." Mobileye's CTO and co-founder Amnon Shashua told Reuters that the electric vehicle maker was using his company's machine vision sensor system in applications for which it had not been designed. "No matter how you spin it, (Autopilot) is not designed for that. It is a driver assistance system and not a driverless system," Shashua said. In a statement to Reuters, Tesla said that it has "continuously educated customers on the use of the features, reminding them that they're responsible to keep their hands on the wheel and remain alert and present when using Autopilot" and that the system has never been described as autonomous or self-driving. (This statement appears to be at odds with statements made by Musk at shareholder meetings.) It is also emerging that the crash which cost Joshua Brown his life in May of this year was unlikely to have been the first such fatal crash involving Tesla's Autopilot. In January of this year in China, a Tesla ploughed into the back of a stationary truck at speed, killing the driver.
Gives new meaning to computer crash
Asking customers to remain alert while the car drives itself for hours on end is unreasonable. Psychologists know that, NASA warned them about it... Human beings simple can't concentrate for that amount of time with nothing to do.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Bad move...
Tesla has about 2 fatalities per 100 million miles. South Carolina, the worst state in the US for accidents, has 1.65 accidents/100M. Massachusetts has .57.
Clearly, self driving cars have a long way to go.
Expecting Tesla to survive the avalanche of product liability suits that are coming is crazy. Musk appears oblivious to the problem. This is not a PR issue. There are numerous chinks in Tesla's armor that will be pried open and exploited by plaintiff lawyers. The company is toast. Mobileye is just trying to save itself and preserve relationships with other vendors.
As for that idiot Hotz...we can go visit him in some slum apartment in a few years. Bring a 12 pack and you can listen to him complain about how the system is rigged.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
It is very possible that this whole mess really is all Tesla's fault, but I also can't help but wonder if Mobileye just threw them under the bus to protect their own reputation.
Mobileye doesn't want the liability exposure in that market, whether or not their product actually fulfills the role that Tesla is using it for.
Sour grapes from a former vendor. Mobileye would sell cameras to blind people if they could. Vendors are not leading any auto program in the industry... 2nd and 3rd tier vendors are even worse, and require constant attention, or they will deliver poor quality and unsafe products.
More likely they raised their prices and Tesla balked at the price and moved to another vendor.
The problem with Mobileye's view is that no matter what you call it, people will treat it like the car drives itself. Mobileye's CTO, "No matter how you spin it, (Autopilot) is not designed for that. It is a driver assistance system and not a driverless system". They'd like to differentiate the 2 but the line is very blurry, and fading more everyday. Mobileye's disclaimer is no more indemnifying than Tesla's, "continuously educated customers on the use of the features, reminding them that they're responsible to keep their hands on the wheel and remain alert and present when using Autopilot". To me it just smells like Mobileye is doing anything they can to make sure blame doesn't make it all the way to them.
because there isn't much to run into in the air and flights are required to file a flight plan so they have clear airspace. Even then, you always have a pilot on the ready. And this has been around for decades. Letting a computer be in full control of your life on the ground at high speeds is foolish.
Right, nor do they want to be named in the inevitable lawsuits...
You don't understand litigation either. Tesla sold the vehicle and will take the lion's share of the liability. Even if they manage to hold in a component vendor, it won't be for the bulk of the payouts.
Even if Tesla had an umbrella liability policy covering this type of thing, it's either cancelled already or under underwriter review and will be cancelled based upon these events.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
We don't even understand how humans make split-second decisions while driving, let alone know how to replicate that decision-making in software. So programming a computer to do this is a completely random act. This is not AI, and anyone who says it is now an accomplice to manslaughter.
I find the timing interesting. After the Tesla crash, Mobileeye admitted that their system can't distinguish cars or trucks entering the main road from a side road. They then said it would take several years to implement this functionality. Then they "dropped" Tesla. It looks to me more as if the Mobileeye product had a hidden defect. If Mobileye had publicised this problem in advance of the crash, it is likely that Tesla and the other car manufacturers considering Mobileeye would have had a better understanding of the Mobileeye limitations, and could have adjusted their plans accordingly.
Seriously, it is obvious that mobile eye could not do that. Otherwise, Tesla would not have put in all this work on software to go much much further than what mobileye software did. Tesla only used them for hardware, not their crappy software.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Shorting a Tesla is generally a bad idea. 60-85kWH batteries tend to react vigorously to that sort of treatment.
Then Tesla has obviously been lying to everyone about Autopilot. From the way they described it, it was practically a self driving car.
Well... It IS a self driving car... Until it crashes into something...
How's that different from and airplane which flies... Until it hits the ground?
How practical this all is, is left up to the reader to decide.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Whenever I think of Tesla drivers complaining about the Autopilot, I think of this(sorry, couldn't find the actual clip)
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Prepare for the onrush of /. Musk worshipers defending Teslas and everything Musk does and says...
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Funny but technically the tesla battery is probably the most advanced and capable electric vehicle battery on the market. It would most likely just heat the conductor you are shorting it with and have no internal issues. It's not like a galaxy note 7.
How hard did Elon fuck this guy's company that he comes out with this publicly?
My guess is this company said "you can't really do what you're trying to do with our stuff", Elon said 'make it work or else' and then implemented the 'or else' when they either failed or declined.
-Styopa
One of the few things I will take for granted from Elon, is his vision that if EVERY car on the road follows SOLIDLY PROGRAMMED RULES (and the sensors, of course, do not all catastrophically fail, frequently), you will have a drastic decrease, maybe even statistically eliminate car accidents. Everybody has this misconception that automated "piloting", whatever its form, will eventually create harm either by outright failure or for being so right it eventually acknowledges the "crew" is "a" harm. Fact of the matter is, everybody is just afraid of acknowledging their own imperfection, and of losing their jobs and their economy, because the definition of automation is exactly that: replacing people with a better, cheaper and easier process. We have robots flying millions of miles to other planets without much issue. Yet the main reason we don't send humans to first missions of anything is not because they're worse - it's just that they're a liability to lose in a complexity of aspects that cannot be controlled at all - public opinion is very powerful into downing any idea it preempts wrong..
I believe Elon is damn right that it is necessary to take risks in driving automation, and the holy grail in that field is to move human brain and action 100% out of the equation, for the simplest reason of them all: the driver, unlike computers, does not always have his safety as the first priority, be it by will to do something else or by distraction. Were talking big car companies here, not a service provider of a yet small car producer. Small companies cannot phathom the handling of such liability, oftentimes they don't even have the financial or legal capacity to handicap themselves with an established legal defense: ultimately the driver is liable for 99% litigation that happens about accidents TODAY because HE IS MAKING ALL DECISIONS IN REAL-TIME. Drivers don't stand a chance really. Judges will minutely side with the driver in litigation "against a car", and when they do, it usually makes it to national television.
Elon has been risking it with both Tesla and Space X because he knows he has, to some extent, the money (or the ability to direct others' money) into something bold. This is not courage like Apple likes to call it, it's calculated risk assessment with a very high return and smaller than usual probability - nobody wants that kind of bet, unless they're either truly altruistic or they're in the business of not having a standardized existence in this world. And guess what, that is just fine by me and I won't blame him for trying to be great.
Rename it to something like Copilot or Driver Assist. They can say what they want about how Autopilot should be used but the name suggests otherwise.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Ok. Tesla. Next?
I find it really bizarre that Tesla is using the logic that people are imperfect drivers so we need automated driving... and then expect them to be even more perfect in staying diligent at the wheel while there is nothing to do. Yes people are not perfect, so design a system that is foolproof or leave it alone.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Apparently Elon is still posting as anonymous coward.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Then Tesla has obviously been lying to everyone about Autopilot. From the way they described it, it was practically a self driving car.
It is "practically" a self-driving car, for the typical value of "practically" — in colloquial English, it is a common substitution for the word "almost". Which is to say, not practical at all. But what's actually far more relevant than stupid word games (which is all you're playing at) is that Tesla forces a substantial safety lecture onto drivers who want to use Autopilot. You can't actually turn it on until your vehicle has been blessed, which doesn't happen until after you've been lectured to. It's quite clear to any driver who has been through this process what the limitations of the system are; if not, they are not capable of understanding fairly clear language and should be imprisoned within a remedial language classroom for the safety of themselves and others.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It would be pretty bold of them to make the claim that they never intended their technology to be used in the way that Tesla used it without being able to prove it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Apparently he's learned nothing from all the Samsung posts lately.
It's pretty well-known (among those who actually work on autonomous vehicles) that you don't even attempt to build something like the Tesla auto-pilot unless you have a (big, expensive) LIDAR system on the roof. Otherwise you stick to adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning, and emergency brake application. You certainly don't attempt to follow the contours of a road with such very limited sensor input.
Undiscovered feature found in Tesla Autopilot https://www.inverse.com/articl... Could this could be an issue in terms of agreement ?
and tesla said THEY dumped mobileye...
The beauty of LIDAR is you aren't limited to visible wavelengths of light.
Infra-red is considerably better than visible wavelengths at handling smoke & fog. It may not penetrate for miles, but it will do just fine for a few hundred meters.
Ever wonder why the James Webb space telescope is infra-red? Because an IR telescope can see through gas clouds that block visible light.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
What? They launch for several countries and companies. http://www.spacex.com/missions
Yes, people requesting citation are certainly suspect.