Slashdot Mirror
Newest Tesla Autopilot Data Shows A 40% Drop in Crashes (bloomberg.com)
There's a surprise in the data from an investigation into Tesla safety by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg:
[W]hile all Tesla vehicles come with the hardware necessary for Autopilot, you need a software upgrade that costs thousands of dollars to make it work. Since buyers can add Autopilot features after purchase, this provides a perfect before-and-after comparison. It turns out that, according to the data Tesla gave investigators, installing Autopilot prevents crashes -- by an astonishing 40 percent...
Now -- thanks to an investigation that initially hurt the company -- there is finally some real data, and it's good news for Tesla... As the software matures to match the new hardware, Musk said on Thursday via a Tweet, Tesla is targeting a 90 percent reduction in car crashes.
UPDATE (5/4/18): The NHTSA has now clarified that their study "did not assess the effectiveness of this technology.
UPDATE (2/16/19): The study's underlying data reveals serious flaws in the methodology that undermine its credibility, according to new analysis from a research and consulting firm.
Now -- thanks to an investigation that initially hurt the company -- there is finally some real data, and it's good news for Tesla... As the software matures to match the new hardware, Musk said on Thursday via a Tweet, Tesla is targeting a 90 percent reduction in car crashes.
UPDATE (5/4/18): The NHTSA has now clarified that their study "did not assess the effectiveness of this technology.
UPDATE (2/16/19): The study's underlying data reveals serious flaws in the methodology that undermine its credibility, according to new analysis from a research and consulting firm.
I think the technology is a good idea, but they've picked a terrible name for it. To someone who is uninformed, it makes it sound as though the feature enables automated driving for the vehicle, and while that may be the end goal, it's currently not at that level and may give a false sense of capability. They should refer to it as "Driver Assist" or something that doesn't leave anyone with a false impression of the capabilities of what it does.
Probably because the bag of meat's eyes are too often turned elsewhere.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I'm anti-antibiotic and modern medical intervention because I think knowing that they're available just makes people careless and sloppy when they travel in areas where those interventions aren't available. I would much rather a few more people die because we don't use antibiotics at all than for people to become reliant on them and just become careless and unfit.
I agree that there could be secondary effects, but the more logical conclusion from my standpoint is that if the technology definitively improves safety then eventually it should become standard across the board in all cars and then the issue of "dependence" will eventually become moot. Pointing out that people who don't use the technology have worse outcomes than those who do is an endorsement of the technology, not a reason to block the use of it.
But the AutoPilot in an aircraft and and in this case the Tesla do the same thing. They assist in control of the aircraft. AutoPilots do not replace the pilot or relegate his/her duties to that of a passenger, you still have to have a pilot or you aren't going anywhere. The name is appropriate.
The Tesla Autopilot is pretty good for how early in car automation we are. It would be a terrible inconvenience to require you to put your hands on the wheel when you are driving thru some stretches of the American south-west, like going between Phoenix and LA on i10. Just like it would be a terrible inconvenience to expect the auto-pilot of a passenger jet liner to require input every three seconds before it disengages between Heathrow and JFK. There is no reason for it. There is no need for a law.
Will accidents happen? Sure. Just like aircraft accidents still happen. The goal of the technology is to reduce the chance of an accident happening, not eliminate it altogether, while providing some amount of relief for the pilot / driver. It is pretty hard to keep at attention for many hours on end when the task is so mundane. As the technology gets better and better, and more wide-spread, we will see more and more benefits from this technology, like reduced energy consumption by drafting closely to the car infant of you, or reduced traffic congestion by synchronized acceleration, intersection control, etc.. etc..
Wouldn't disengaging the autopilot when the driver's hands are off the wheel cause more crashes? It sounds like that would be negligent in the extreme. The autopilot should not disengage until the driver's hands are ON the wheel to assure continuous control of the vehicle through the transition.
People keep making this argument about the analogy between Tesla's feature and the autopilot feature of airplanes, but how many normal people know an airplane's autopilot works? It's a pointless comparison unless it's a widely known fact among the general public, which I'd argue it is not. I'll bet most people have the same mis-impression of an airline's autopilot feature.
Even so, I think we're just in a collective learning curve regarding semi-autonomous vehicles. Eventually, the cars will become fully autonomous anyhow, so I'm not terrible concerned. The fact that collisions are down by 40% validates what many of us long believed, which is that computers are going to be much safer drivers than humans. And this is just a very early and flawed first iteration of the technology to come.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
If an airplane autopilot goes bad it would take many tens of seconds if not minutes for disaster to ensue. They are basically dumb things that maintain direction and altitude. If the pilot looks out the window, it takes many seconds for an on coming plane to arrive. More likely they rely on TCAS, the transponder based alerting. But it all happens quite slowly during a cruise, which is why pilots can study a map while flying.
Cars on the other hand are often only a second or two from disaster. Swerve into oncoming traffic and things happen very fast indeed.