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Tesla Avoids Recall After Autopilot Crash Death (bbc.com)
Tesla will not be ordered to recall its semi-autonomous cars in the US, following a fatal crash in May 2016. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration closed its investigation after it found no evidence of a defect in the vehicle. From a report: Joshua Brown was killed when his car collided with a lorry while operating in Autopilot mode. Tesla has stated Autopilot is only designed to assist drivers, who must keep their hands on the wheel. The feature is intended to be used on the motorway, where is lets cars automatically change lanes and react to traffic. The NHTSA report said data from the car showed that "the driver took no braking, steering or other actions to avoid the collision". Bryan Thomas from the NHSTA said the driver should have been able to see the lorry for seven seconds, which "should have been enough time to take some action".
...Is it really an autopilot crash? Or some guy who, unfortunately, wasn't paying as much attention as he should whilst driving a 2 tonne hunk of metal around other human beings?
Then what's the point? If my hands are already there, I might as well steer the car.
Useful technology, just slightly misnamed!
The same investigation found that Tesla’s crash rate was reduced by 40% after introduction of Autopilot:
https://electrek.co/2017/01/19...
According to this article, not only should he have been able to see the truck for 7 seconds, but the truck driver said he was watching Harry Potter:
http://www.theverge.com/2017/1...
It's tragic, but at least he didn't hurt anyone else.
We kicked you poofters out of our country once. We'll do it again if need be. God bless America!! The redcoats are coming, the redcoats are coming.
Hey, it spell-checked!
As long as the so-called "Autopilot" ist simply an assistant, that's how it should be done properly and it should be a requirement.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
As a Canadian, my question is: WTF is a lorry?
RTFA, dipshit.
Get over and start using proper American English.
What's "American English"? You mean something like Cherokee, right? Do you speak that?
Go back to Eastern Europe where your unwanted immigrant ancestors came from and leave America for the real Americans.
...Is it really an autopilot crash? Or some guy who, unfortunately, wasn't paying as much attention as he should whilst driving a 2 tonne hunk of metal around other human beings?
Well, you you read the statement in the summary:
The NHSTA is saying that while Tesla's autopilot features are made to help avoid collisions and improve safety, they are not legally responsible for keeping a driver safe. The driver still is responsible for operating the vehicle, including in emergency situations. The owner here did not make any attempt to avoid the collision but should have been aware of the situation. Either he was being an inattentive driver, or he deliberately failed to take action, expecting the Tesla system to instead. In either case the Tesla system is not the one to blame for the accident not being avoided.
What the fuck is "American" English?
People are lazy and stupid. If they have a toy that drives for them they are going to activate autopilot and not think they have to pay attention.
It's got to be all or nothing. This half-control is bullshit and is going to lead people into a false sense of security.
How can you be expected to both pay attention and not pay attention at the same time? If the car is driving then I promise you most people are going to be checking Facebook or watching movies. That's just how people are wired.
All or nothing. It's the only way to go.
American English is the kind that British would never use.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
It's the language where a truck is a truck and not a lorry.
most certainly did not use the word "lorry" when talking about the incident.
So if he injected himself with all the marijuana the car won't drive him home?
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Some English say "y'all" too. They invented cockney. I don't think you can put a contraction for "you all" on the same level as "t'other'n"
The problem is that, human nature being what it is, a lot of drivers will come to rely too much on autopilot and will stop paying attention just like this guy apparently did. That will cause a lot of crashes just by itself. This isn't DIRECTLY the fault of autopilot, but is rather an INDIRECT consequence of having it (combined with human nature).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
> People misunderstand what an autopilot does.
Pilots are supposed to be *prepared* to take over, but a class IIIb system can land the plane in zero visibility. Well, *technically* it's not supposed to be zero, but the plane is 200 feet long and you're supposed to have 150 feet of visibility. In other words, you can see only half a second in front of you. Some autopilot systems can pretty much fly the plane without pilot input - much more so than Tesla's system. Heck even on a DJI (toy), the autopilot can take off, fly to preset waypoints, come back, and land. The operator is supposed to be watching as it does this.
With Air France flight 447, it seems to me the crew a) didn't know how to fly the plane with conflicting airspeed indicators and b) didn't communicate with each other - at one point the POC and the co-pilot each thought they were flying the plane. Also, the stall warning turning *off* due to an extreme stall was a problem. I'm not sure that the autopilot had much to do with any of that. Given the conflicting readings, nobody was able to fly the plane properly - not the pilot-in-command, not the copilot, and not the autopilot.
Yall over yonder in England ain't speakin English right! You don't have sidewalks and walk on the pavement instead - so uncivilized. Heck, the place is so undeveloped you need designated zebra crossings. And the cars don't even have trunks - they make do with a boot at the back!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
When the next Hitler arrives, let's allow him Britian. After all, America wasn't great, saving your ass.
The problem is that, human nature being what it is, a lot of drivers will come to rely too much on autopilot and will stop paying attention just like this guy apparently did. That will cause a lot of crashes just by itself. This isn't DIRECTLY the fault of autopilot, but is rather an INDIRECT consequence of having it (combined with human nature).
Not really a problem. The insurance companies already track accidents based on model and features. It will only take a few years of data to determine whether a particular autopilot feature makes a driver safer or not. If it reduces the number of severe accidents and fatalities then it's still a win even if it shifts the type of accidents.
There are a dozen sensors and feedback techniques to guarantee that the driver is touching the steering wheel and more than a few ways to use an electronics steering system to keep the driver aware. So.... WTF? I think Tesla wants this shit to happen. A Darwin award of sorts while they get their data on how close they are to full automation.
Rather than "hands on wheel", it should be "eyes looking towards road ahead". My tablet can tell if I'm looking at it. The car should be able to see the driver is in the seat, looking forward, with their eyes open.
Reasonable gaps of a couple seconds should be allowed since humans are supposed to look around but that's just a programming detail.
So say the car realizes the driver hasn't been looking forward for a certain number of seconds, it warns the driver, starts slowing down and attempts to hand control over to the driver.
Really dark sunglasses would be an issue. And sunlight was an issue in the florida crash.
Still, holding your arms up for hours is a recipe for pain.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Ok I give..what the fuck is a "lorry"?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It's not a win if someone dies that wouldn't have in the absence of the technology.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Indeed, and what TFS omits is that the NHTSA determined that overall, the "autopilot" feature of Tesla's reduces accidents by 40%.
It turns out lots of Volvo owners are idiots and step on the gas instead of the brake, but the NTSTA guys can't call the US public a bunch of fools, so they had to phrase the findings somewhat diplomatically.
There might be more of these.
A British Truck. I am not sure why it was driving in the US
Why do you feel that some contractions are OK to use, such as isn't but not ya'll?
Its not a British truck, its the British word for a "big rig" The reason they used that word is because the article is from the BBC
It is still wrong that people are dying that didn't need to. Great on the 40% but if you have human compassion you feel bad for the family of the guy that died because he 'became complacent' in a car that does the driving for him.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Nobody who ever died in a car crash would have died in a car crash if we didn't have cars. So cars are a loss?
"Old man yells at systemd"
I find it hilarious that the people who brought us the word "y'all" will tell the people of England that they are speaking English wrong.
"Y'all" has an immediately evident meaning and does a great job at making the second-person plural explicit, so while I may not use it and certainly wouldn't espouse its use in formal writing, it's hardly an egregious sin against the English language.
Moreover, those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. British English has plenty of its own quirks to cite, whether we're talking about genericized brands (e.g. Brevilles and Hoovers), weird dialects (e.g. Cockney), or odd pronunciations (e.g. pronouncing the "h" in "herb" and dropping the "h" from "hotel", even though the French words they each came from did the exact opposite). Of course, we could cite similar quirks in American English (e.g. Kleenexes and Band-Aids, Cajun dialect, and all of the Americanized spellings we can attribute to Noah Webster of Merriam-Webster fame), but that's exactly the point: they're both screwed up, so let's give the one-upping each other a rest.
As for "lorry", I have no problem with the BBC using "lorry" in place "tractor trailer", given that the BBC serves a primarily British audience. But Slashdot serves an international audience of decently educated people who are familiar with both British and American English, so it makes sense to use the original terminology wherever possible. In this particular case, the coverage is for a report authored by the US government, so using the term "tractor trailer" would make far more sense.
The crash was all the pilot's fault. If they had just sat there and looked at it it would not have crashed. Waiting 20 seconds and reengaging the autopilot would have solved the problem. The readings were only conflicting when they put the plane into an absolutely crazy flight envelope that the instruments were not designed to handle. At any time they could have looked at the attitude indicator to see what was going on. The reaction to loss of airspeed indicator is to raise the nose to a certain level and set the engines to a certain power. They yanked the aircraft nose all the way up and slammed the throttle forward. Unless you are about to hit a mountain that is not the right reaction for any event.
Ever been to Williston, Florida? I have.
If you said the word "lorry" to most of the residents there, they would cock their head and say "Huh?"
Using the local parlance, it was a semi. Or semi tractor-trailer rig if you want to get fancy about it.
The fact that cars are something that people can own and use provides way more benefit to humans and the risk is worth it obviously, because otherwise people wouldn't drive. Even if the 40% figure were true for autopilot, which it isn't, it is a small benefit by comparison considering it is only 40% of people who can afford and want a Tesla.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Don't give me that "America saved the world" bullshit. You had a "Defend America First" movement that lobbied successfully to keep the US out of the war for years. Hell, there was a stage when the UK was the only country standing up to Hitler. The US didn't get involved until they were attacked themselves, unlike the UK who decided that Poland was a good place to draw a line in the sand.
Elon Musk could shoot someone in Times Square and get away with it.
The plane's length and its landing speed aren't necessarily equal. That said, it's amusing that the first plane I looked up—the 767—the landing speed is up to 199 MPH, and that does just happen to equate to almost exactly half a second. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I’m not going to feel too bad for the family of that guy when the families of the (number of accidents * 40%) who didn’t die are still happily running around. There are fewer accidents on the whole with Autopilot than without it. That’s a clear win.
Also, if this is the case I think it is, the driver was a douche and completely at fault. He made a habit of posting videos of himself using Autopilot improperly. IE completely not paying attention to the road like he should have been. Stupidity caught up with him. Send a Darwin Award to the family of “Florida Man” (yup, him again. . .) and move on.
And yeah, my level of human compassion for stupid people is borderline sociopath most days.
Typical logic-fail, overly-conservative, sheep-herd, think-of-the-children thinking.
In the absence of cars, no one would die in a car crash. However cars provide a massive overall benefit so we accept the risks.
In the absence of autopilot, (theoretically, pending more stats) many people would die in accidents that the 'autopilot' is quick enough to avoid and/or limit the severity of. 'Autopilot' (potentially) provides overall benefit even if it introduces some less severe risks that would not otherwise be present. Additionally, expecting this to be perfect is ridiculous anyway. Human drivers are extremely fallible. It doesn't take much to improve in the crash-and-death sense, not to mention traffic flow situations (compare humans merging 5 lanes to 1 for an accident/construction vs. AI)
Furthermore, the risk here is drivers mis-using a technology to begin with. You can mis-use almost anything. You do so at your own peril despite the eleven-teen billion warnings everywhere.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
So the lesson is, if you are already a safe driver don't buy autopilot. If you buy autopilot you will be lulled into a sense of false security and possibly die. I guess people who are drunks and like to text while driving can't buy autopilot either. This is a technology for the worst drivers.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I think NHTSA must be hard to spell. The article got it wrong once in three attempts, and you got it wrong twice in two attempts. Bonus points for two distinct incorrect spellings.
Only if they're complete morons. Last I heard Tesla goes out of their way to smack even lazy people upside the head to pay attention to the road, with the vehicle beeping like crazy and eventually turning off autopilot if the driver isn't regularly giving input via the steering wheel. Your argument is a little like saying that adding odorant to propane is dangerous because people won't properly maintain their gas piping. Autopilot is a step towards better vehicles, but as with pretty much everything it is not the all inclusive, final, perfect solution for all time.
If only there were some sort of central repository of information that you could query to quickly find the answer to your question, ideally in less time than it took you to click Reply, type in your question with extra unimportant information, click Preview, then click Submit.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Per Airbus training, throttle forward and stick back are the responses to most emergencies, powering out of the situation.
The inexperienced third pilot (right seat) was trying to do that, while the second pilot (left seat) was pushing forward on the stick trying to get the nose down. Airbus's control scheme averages the control inputs instead of having a preferred input and without feedback, the pilots did not know they were opposing each other into the aircraft doing nothing. They realized it seconds before impact, but it was too late to get the nose down and trade altitude for airspeed.
The problem was their attitude indicators were unreliable as some pitots were frozen. A simple piece of string hanging from the overhead console would have told them they were in an extreme nose-up attitude.
Ok I give..what the fuck is a "lorry"?
An excuse for you to make an indignant comment instead of just googling the damn word. Just buy yourself a hair shirt and save us all some trouble.
You have to be a licensed driver and carry insurance to drive. Perhaps people with these new "features" should have to take a class and test and get an upgrade on their license (like I did for my Motorcycle). And they (like some states like Michigan do) should require additional insurance so when the driver of the autopilot gets sued, they have enough cash to pay out to the driver that was injured do to their inattention.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
> The plane's length and its landing speed aren't necessarily equal.
Yeah I wasn't saying they were.
> That said, it's amusing that the first plane I looked upâ"the 767â"the landing speed is up to 199 MPH, and that does just happen to equate to almost exactly half a second. :-)
The 777 is also about the same speed, so half a second to travel 150 feet.
An American thought "Cruise Control" on his RV meant he could pop round to the kitchen and make himself something to eat or drink while on the freeway.
It didn't.
So it doesn't require relying on autopilot for this sort of thing to happen.
The problem is that, human nature being what it is, a lot of drivers will come to rely too much on autopilot and will stop paying attention just like this guy apparently did. That will cause a lot of crashes just by itself. This isn't DIRECTLY the fault of autopilot, but is rather an INDIRECT consequence of having it (combined with human nature).
Maybe we should get rid of warning sirens for weather-events, too. A lot of people will come to rely too much on the tornado siren to tell them if they need to take cover and stop paying attention to what the actual conditions are outside their homes. It's not directly the fault of the lack of sirens that the fellow was flattened in his house, but rather an indirect consequence of having the sirens not go off before the funnel came up his street (combined with human nature).
At what point is the operator ultimately held accountable for operation of a motor vehicle?
That is who you should feel compassion for, you jackass.
If smart people fuck up, they probably should have known better.
Maybe they don't want to type TSA?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The term British English is highly offensive to an English person living in England. We speak English you all speak something else whether it be American English, Canadian English etc.
How does driving provide net benifit. Driving allows people to be lazy and provides them with a sense of entitlement and power they would not feel if they were not wrapped in their steel cacoons. If you outlawed automobiles people would be happier and healthiery.
Im not saying to do this, it would save lives if you did. Just as you would save lives if you banned guns, or sugar,or alcohal, or having sex.
If you are a safe driver, it makes you safer, if you're an idiot who isn't paying attention to the road, it makes you safer, but not as safe as an already safe driver.
Under no circumstances does this technology make you less safe. Only you can do that by being stupid and not paying attention to the road.
Autopilot doesn't "lull you into a sense of false security" YOU "lull you into a sense of false security" but only if you were already an unsafe driver.
Personal responsibility is so last century, we don't do that any more. It's always SOMEONE's fault, and it's never our own!
If you are already a safe driver this doesn't make you any more safe. Not until 90% of the other drivers out there have it. It's human nature that people get distracted from events they have no mental investment in. You can't hold people responsible for human nature. Tesla should be doing more work to fix their technology which is clearly not working well with humans.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Only Japan attacked, and the USA were geared up to fight Japan and leave Europe out of it (despite FDR and several others thinking that doing the decent thing was right), but HITLER declared War against the USA (because Japan was part of the Axis), saving the USA's president the effort of convincing the USA to go to war: it was already declared.
Otherwise they may not have come over to "save the day" at all.
And USSR did far more to relieve Europe than the USA did. Not really by choice: Stalin was an asshole and not risking HIS life (though he DID stay in Leningrad (IIRC) during its siege, which helped enormously to keep people there fighting, even for people who hated him, the small amount of sharing with the rest of the populace was accepted as a brave act for someone who could easily have avoided it.
As per usual on /., didn't read the actual article, but just the synopsis..and it was talking about the US traffic safety board not finding Tesla fault...so, wasn't sure why a US story was using slang that isn't familiar to someone IN the US.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Surely, then, the autopilot did nothing anyway.
Whatever Tesla might claim, autopilot is a dumb idea.
In this instance, it literally did NOTHING to prevent a collision that should have been obvious to a driver for over 7 seconds.
Sure, it's the driver's fault for relying on it, same as if you drive "relying" on your ABS to operate instead of leaving a sensible distance.
But surely it just proves that autopilot is a load of shit and this just says that you can't even blame the manufacturer if it does nothing whatsoever.
It's like someone selling you a laptop that, if the keyboard doesn't work, aw, sorry, that's your own fault for not checking it works all the time you use it.
If we recalled a line of cars every time someone died in one... we'd have no cars left at all.
funny, a whole lot of fat truck drivers manage to pull that off. Simple solution, as implemented for the plebes. Just like lane assist for the Honda, it kicks off if yu take your hand off the wheel. That's really, really easy to implement.
Yet you're willing to support AI so that it can help people who can't stop driving after drinking or need to text. The smart ones already had great driving records. It is the stupid ones you are protecting with this technology.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Yeah, I see how it could look like that. There is of course a slight relationship - I just crashed a plane that's 2 feet long and lands at 10 MPH. I don't imagine there is any 200 foot plane that lands at 10MPH, though there are some small models that fly fast
1) We're talking about a dialect that spans the British isles as a whole, rather than being unique to England. The only thing offensive here (other than your butchery of the language; see: "We speak English you all speak something else...") is your willful exclusion of the other countries in Great Britain.
2) While I might allow that it could be offensive in some contexts (e.g. if I was in England and was making a point of overemphasizing the word "British" for no reason other than to be rude), the notion that it could be considered offensive in the context of an international audience discussing the differences between dialects is utterly absurd, given that those are the widely-accepted terms. If you find it offensive, I'll kindly suggest that you get over yourself.
I'll grant that it may be grating, in much the same way that any quirk of a different dialect will strike you as odd. I find it grating that my wife uses the word "coke" to refer to everything from Sprite to root beer. I find it grating when I have to rack my brain to remember the meanings of distinctly British idioms, such as "waiting for the penny to drop" or "throwing his toys out of the pram". I find everything about Cockney and Cajun dialects grating. But to suggest that any of those are offensive? Come on.
Well, except for the "coke" thing. I think we can all agree that's inexcusable.
On net, it still may be. I agree it's not a win *for that person* who dies that wouldn't have in the absence of the technology, but it's a trolley problem.
Hey Jackass, Americans speak normal, the proof is that most of the movies the world over that spread the tongue are in normal American. You nerds speak with a funny accent. We're new world, you're Old world. Should be called Ye Olde English. Or in nerd speak, English v0.1066. We're English 1.776+ mothafucka.
If the human would have been able to see the truck for 7 seconds, the "autopilot" should have been able to have seen it for even longer, and 7 seconds is already *a lot* for a computer, making it a pretty crappy autopilot..
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Negative, it's the British word for delivery truck. Medium duty & box trucks are lorries and are not, by any definition, big rigs.
The fact that cars are something that people can own and use provides way more benefit to humans and the risk is worth it obviously, because otherwise people wouldn't drive
For a small fraction of what is spent on personal vehicle ownership, we could have pretty amazing public transportation that would satisfy the needs of nearly every city & suburb dweller. And that would naturally lead to fewer serious accidents.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Surely, then, the autopilot did nothing anyway.
Whatever Tesla might claim, autopilot is a dumb idea.
In this instance, it literally did NOTHING to prevent a collision that should have been obvious to a driver for over 7 seconds.
Sure, it's the driver's fault for relying on it, same as if you drive "relying" on your ABS to operate instead of leaving a sensible distance.
But surely it just proves that autopilot is a load of shit and this just says that you can't even blame the manufacturer if it does nothing whatsoever.
CTFD. Autopilot is a work in progress and the newer version will, in time, be far more capable. In this particular case, the Autopilot didn't react because it couldn't distinguish the side of the truck from what could also have been a large overhead sign. It's important to note the driver also didn't react, despite having ample time.
On average, Autopilot is far better than not having it but I think Musk's plans for autonomy will take longer than he thinks and the corner cases will prove to be intractable and more & better hardware will be needed for true autonomous driving.
But what will be achieved with the new AP HW2.0 will be very impressive - and the competition from other automakers will be fierce
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
in fact, I was surprised that story was not the lead on this.
This story is a joke in that it does not recognize that Tesla is now considered not just the safest car, but with AP is saving NUMEROUS lives.
When Model 3 hits the market later this year, it should become quickly obvious that tesla will be saving lives, energy, and money.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You know damn well he's not going to bother looking up what a hair shirt is.
It's not actually slang. Just the same as you should expect to see "car bonnet" instead of "hood" or "rubbish bin" instead of "trash can" when reading the BBC, which is after all, a British site. They're not going to Americanise their content just because the article talks about something in the US.
A rainbow-coloured, nectar eating parrot.
How it wrecked his car, I have no clue. They are pretty cute, though, he probably got distracted.
"Who the hell is Nietzche? It's a question stupid people are asking." -- Newscaster, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
You ever get one stuck in your exhaust pipe? It ain'tÂpretty.
Alternatively, don't call it an autopilot when it isn't. Keep all the benefits, and reduce the risks. Nah, can't do that, because Elon Musk is god and his company is, you know, a company, and a company is better than the government, so there.
Actually, it's the British English that's moved on, nearly all the expressions you used are the OLD ones that the Brits don't use any more.
...Scottish English, Welsh English, Midlands English, Cornish English...I don't think you really have a case, old boy.
In fact it's working so poorly that the report states there are 40 fewer collisions while using it. We could all hope other systems work so poorly.
But let's not let facts get in the way of your preconceived notions.
Apparently she Slashdot couldn't handle the percent sign in my comment, that's 40 percent fewer collisions.
For a small fraction of what is spent on personal vehicle ownership, we could have pretty amazing public transportation that would satisfy the needs of nearly every city & suburb dweller. And that would naturally lead to fewer serious accidents.
Also for a small fraction of what is spent on fast food, people could buy and cook healthy vegetarian meals for themselves, that would satisfy the nutritional needs of nearly every citizen. And that would naturally lead to fewer cases of heart disease and obesity.
Unfortunately, what people want is not always the same as what would theoretically work the best. In this case, most people want private cars, and they have made that preference clear through both their spending and their voting patterns. Barring the advent of some kind of benign dictatorship, a transition to all-public-transit won't happen anytime soon.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The smart ones already had great driving records. It is the stupid ones you are protecting with this technology.
Being smart doesn't protect you from stupid people's actions -- you can be a perfect driver and still get rear-ended by someone who never saw you slow down because they were texting.
This technology protects stupid people and the smart people who have to share the roads with them.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
That would be a wonderful world to live in for sure. But the world you describe probably demanded a sacrifice in the pursuit of knowledge and perfection like we on planet Earth are attempting now.
Until some alien from a perfect world gives us a flash drive with all of the necessary knowledge we will have to figure it out ourselves. There is not other way around this. People are going to die. Even if we shedded ourselves of all technology, people are still going to die. It's been happening since the dawn of mankind.
There's an interesting documentary series on netflix right now the shows how this progress works in the aviation industry. It's called Air Disasters.
Plenty of rainbow lorikeets where I live, never heard anyone call them a lorry. Most people call them parrots, some incorrectly call them rosellas.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Barring the advent of some kind of benign dictatorship, a transition to all-public-transit won't happen anytime soon
That would depend on the definition of soon but I'm not alone in noting that younger people aren't as keen about cars as my generation were in our teens & 20s.
Passenger vehicle sales in the USA have essentially flatlined since the 70s and if you adjust for the driving age population, they've fallen off a cliff.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
You're not wrong about younger people, but I think the trend will be more towards Uber (and similar services) than towards public transit, with the possible exception of metro within large cities.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Actually they don't. Severe shoulder, arm, and back pain is a big deal for truckers. I'm a massage therapist. I've worked on guys who were in "level 10" pain. Real agony.
I've seen issues with the muscles: Teres major, Teres Minor, Latissimus Dorsi, Deltoids, Trapezius, Scalenes, Extensors and Flexors of the forearm, Triceps. (not the bicep very often tho), corocobrachialis. Oh and infra and super spinatus and levitor scapula.
http://dotphysicalutah.com/faq...
Plus the muscles: gluteus max and min (but not med), multifidus, erector spinae/spinalis, quadratus lumborum and psoas major.
http://www.crengland.com/truck...
http://realtruckdriver.com/3-c...
The best position would be in a comfortable char with your arms resting but not crossed watching the road attentively with little "attention" quizzes where you had to tap a button when a light came on. And with the machine observing you were in a capable state-- not falling asleep or looking away from the front for over 10 seconds at a time.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Under no circumstances does this technology make you less safe.
I disagree.
it does TOO MUCH, to the point that even a safe driver CANNOT realistically be expected to be continually engaged with the act of driving for extended periods of time, and that makes him less safe.
If I am driving today, even on a highway, the constant micro-corrections in steering help keep me engaged.
Tesla's autopilot takes that engagement away, Musk himself bragged about 'hardly touching the wheel' on a long trip. After hours of not *needing* to pay attention to the road, and not needing to do *anything*, its pretty easy to imagine it would be pretty easy to be much less engaged, and more easily distracted, and therefore less 'safe'.
And again, Its absolutely not a question of choosing "Tesla autopilot as it is today" or "nothing" ... we could compare "Tesla autopilot today" with a version that had the *same* collision avoidance features, and that would, if it engaged to avoid a collision would only automatically drive enough pull the car over safely... so you had ALL the accident avoidance benefits of Tesla autopilot, but couldn't rely on it to drive for you while you watched a movie, because if it had to brake for you, or it had to correct your lane .... and it didn't detect that you were paying attention by making your own adjustments, then it would simply pull over.
Tesla is touting its ability to drive for you and the ability is enabled for it to drive for you with virtually no input from the driver. And that is LESS SAFE then if it only used its abilities to avoid accident and safely pull over.
The driver still is responsible for operating the vehicle, including in emergency situations. The owner here did not make any attempt to avoid the collision but should have been aware of the situation. Either he was being an inattentive driver, or he deliberately failed to take action, expecting the Tesla system to instead. In either case the Tesla system is not the one to blame for the accident not being avoided.
As much as I love the idea of automated cars, I still have the feeling it's applied the wrong way.
Tesla takes away the easy parts of the driving from the driver. That's of course like 98% of a regular car ride. Most rides you just follow the road, stop at traffic lights, move on with traffic, nothing happens. It's the bit that is the problem: cars or trucks that cross in front of you and force you to slow down, pedestrians suddenly trying to cross, etc.
So as a result, 98% of the time the driver doesn't need to pay attention because the car does so. Most of the above described situations are also handled by autopilot: the crossing truck is detected, and the car slows down or even stops as needed. I think in most cases by the time the driver realises the car is not reacting, it's too late.
In the captioned case, possibly the driver saw the truck, but was used to his car seeing it as well and automatically start slowing down. So the truck starts to turn on the road, and the car starts slowing down. Mmm... The car starts slowing down, I said. There's this obstacle. Hey, shouldn't it start to slow down about now? It always does. Oh. Maybe I should help and apply the brake. Like now. Before something goes CRASH!
It sounds much safer to me to have the driver in control all the times, and have the car look "over his shoulder" and correct if something is about to go wrong. It's got most of the benefits of the existing autopilot, without inviting drivers to go watch Harry Potter movies while sitting behind the wheel.
Your opinion does not agree with the conclusions of the HTSA report.
It looked at driver engegement and how it was affected by driver assisting features. Conclusion is that indeed some periode of inattentiveness exist but rarely bigger than 5 sec. So the 7 seconds in which the driver did not react to the truck crossing his path is very exceptional.
Secondly they looked at the amount of accidents and collisions of Tesla's before and after the Autopilot was introduced. They fell by 40 percent.
In my opinion a good attentive driver, even with automatic systems engaged, will still keep his attention where it belongs: on the road.
Since each car has an auto-pilot, it is just a matter of sending a command, and the car will reach by itself the nearest Tesla service center...
The closest word to a 'big rig' in the UK is an articulated lorry. Check Google Images for comparison. A delivery truck I agree in the UK we would call a lorry or delivery van although that is usually a smaller Ford Transit style.
> a "lorry"?
A kind of Mayflower, but on wheels. The thing english-speaking people rode to come to the navajo-speaking new world.
It should not be called autopilot
Nah... it's not a semi tractor-trailer rig. The "semi" qualifier belongs to the "trailer" part. It's a tractor-semitrailer rig. The trailer is a "semitrailer" because it is only self-supported on the rear end ("semi" meaning "half"). The front end of the trailer is actually over the tractor (pivoting on the "fifth wheel", so to speak), so the trailer only partially trails the tractor (the part with the cab, engine, etc). If you get fancy, get it right.
its awesome that you have a stupid opinion based on nothing. thanks for sharing. The internet is so great now that I know a bunch of fucking idiot opinions. Who needs experts who study things?
It's a common nickname for Lorikeets in the international pet market (although to be fair it's usually spelled "Lori" - but as you can see from the above link "lorry" also gets plenty of hits).
"Who the hell is Nietzche? It's a question stupid people are asking." -- Newscaster, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
... can get you killed. I think Tesla should be congratulated for making evolution work again, at least to a small degree.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Attitude indicators have nothing to do with pitot tubes. Pitot tubes measure speed. Throttle forward and stick back are reactions if you are very low, not near max altitude. What should have happened is one pilot should have taken control, announced that it was his aircraft. The other should have pulled out the checklist for loss of speed indications. I don't know that aircraft, but the response should have been something like 5 degree up on the nose and 85% power. The plane would have flown just fine until the pitot tubes cleared (which only takes 20-30 seconds). The speed indicators would have returned to normal and they could have reengaged the autopilot. Instead, the one pilot reacted as if the plane was entering a dive and was now overspeed. Pulling up would be the correct move, but he never looked at the attitude indicator to see that they weren't diving. They keep doing uncoordinated actions to the point the plane was in such a wide maneuver that they no longer understood the instruments. When flying by instruments, look at them, then decide what to do. You are at 35,000 ft. You have some time to look at the instruments before doing something, you aren't about to hit the ground. That was the main problem, the pilots were only really trained to fly the plane on takeoff and landing, when they are near the ground.
As for "lorry", I have no problem with the BBC using "lorry" in place "tractor trailer", given that the BBC serves a primarily British audience. But Slashdot serves an international audience of decently educated people who are familiar with both British and American English, so it makes sense to use the original terminology wherever possible. In this particular case, the coverage is for a report authored by the US government, so using the term "tractor trailer" would make far more sense.
The BBC is a UK organisation, it will communicate using UK English. The term "tractor trailer" would be meaningless to most of us in the UK, if the BBC quoted it from an original US report they would have to provide an explanation.
Most British people would see "tractor trailer" and assume it was something to do with a farm tractor on or with a trailer. "Lorry" is a generic UK term for a big truck, a quick Google suggests that "articulated lorry" is a closer equivalent.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The BBC is a UK organisation, it will communicate using UK English.
Which is why I said...
I have no problem with the BBC using "lorry" in place "tractor trailer", given that the BBC serves a primarily British audience.
It makes sense for the BBC to use "lorry", given their audience. It makes sense for Slashdot to use whatever the original terminology was, given it's international audience. After all, the choice of those terms will impact how the story is understood. In my case, the fact that "lorry" was used here actually caused me to question whether this was a British report regarding the accident, or if it was perhaps a different accident I was unaware of that had taken place in the UK.
Your opinion does not agree with the conclusions of the HTSA report.
Uh, yeah, it does.
Conclusion is that indeed some periode of inattentiveness exist but rarely bigger than 5 sec. So the 7 seconds in which the driver did not react to the truck crossing his path is very exceptional.
Wow. No it didn't really say that at all. Look at figure 10.
ACC driving -- that's just with adaptive cruise control. people paid attention. 94.59% of the time people looked away from the road it was under 3 seconds. The remain 5.41% was under 5. They never looked away more than 7.
Add "lane assist" (LAADS with no counter measures) and suddenly 8.33% of the time people looked away it was for more than 7 seconds. That's huge... HUGE... like 1 in 12 times you glanced off the road it was for more than 8 seconds.
So Tesla added counter-measures (that's features to alert the driver they aren't paying attention); that's the LAADS column. And that made a big difference, down to 3.72% from 8.33% for glances longer than 7 seconds. But that's still around 1 in 25 glances off the road were *longer* than 7 seconds. 1 in 25 is not "very exceptional"... sure its a lot better than 1 in 12. And 1 in 4 glances off the road are more than 3 seconds. Compared to one in 20 with just adaptive cruise control.
That tells you that yes, I was right, that absolutely, all the data shows that drivers are much less attentive and engaged than they are if they have to steer themselves, even with counter measures.
Secondly they looked at the amount of accidents and collisions of Tesla's before and after the Autopilot was introduced. They fell by 40 percent.
That's not relevant, because what I proposed as an alternative would retain all the collision avoidance benefits.
In my opinion a good attentive driver, even with automatic systems engaged, will still keep his attention where it belongs: on the road.
The study clearly shows a substantial drop off in engagement. Even with counter measures the number of off road glances more than 7 seconds goes from never to 1 in 25. And the number of off road glances exceeding 3 seconds nearly quadruples.
Consider how many off-road glances drivers collectively make -- LAADS systems represent a MASSIVE drop in how much attention is being paid to the road. The LAADS systems may well enable that to be relatively safe, but don't kid yourself for a second that drivers are just as engaged with driving with the systems on as they are without them. The data you cited doesn't bear that out at all.
In my opinion a good attentive driver, even with automatic systems engaged, will still keep his attention where it belongs: on the road.
Unless he has fallen asleep, which is very likely if he doesn't generally need to pay attention.
It turns out lots of Volvo owners are idiots and step on the gas instead of the brake
That's because, unlike European cars, American cars of that era had small gas pedals and enormous brake pedals, so the drivers never needed to be careful where their foot went.
"Lorry" isn't slang, it's a proper word.
Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis
A lorry is a vehicle with a fixed large storage space (like a removal van) behind the cab. An articulated lorry has the hookups to allow a container to be hauled around.
That explains why it was on the wrong side of the road.