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'Operational Limitations' In Tesla Model S Played a 'Major Role' In Autopilot Crash, Says NTSB (reuters.com)
Mr D from 63 writes from a report via Reuters: The chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said on Tuesday "operational limitations" in the Tesla Model S played a "major role" in a May 2016 crash that killed a driver using the vehicle's semi-autonomous "Autopilot" system. Reuters reported on Monday that the NTSB is expected to find that the system was a contributing factor because it allows drivers to avoid steering or watching the road for lengthy periods of time. The NTSB is also expected to find that Tesla Inc could have taken additional steps to prevent the system's misuse and will fault the driver for not paying attention. "Today's automation systems augment, rather than replace human drivers. Drivers must always be prepared to take the wheel or apply the brakes," NTSB Chairman Robert Sumalt said. The system could not reliably detect cross traffic and "did little to constrain the use of autopilot to roadways for which it was designed," the board said. Monitoring driver attention by measuring the driver's touching of the steering wheel "was a poor surrogate for monitored driving engagement." At a public hearing Tuesday on the crash involving Brown, NTSB said the truck driver and the Tesla driver "had at least 10 seconds to observe and respond to each other."
"""Monitoring driver attention by measuring the driver's touching of the steering wheel "was a poor surrogate for monitored driving engagement." """
How would you monitor their engagement? Eye tracking? Manual corrections to the car's path/speed?
What happens when people ignore the "please grab the wheel?" Does the car pull over and park? Is that what it should do?
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
As autonomous cars get better and better, we'll see more and more accidents attributed to driver inattention -- the better the car is at driving, the less the human is going to pay attention to the car or the road, and by the time the car tells the driver "Oh hey, I don't know how to handle this situation, you take over!", the driver won't have enough situational awareness to get out of the situation.
Though the flip side is that as the cars get better at driving, the overall accident rate will decrease.
The same problem already exists with airplane pilots , and it can be even worse where the autopilot compensates for some building condition (like icing), and by the time it gives up control to the pilot, the plane may already be in a bad state and the pilot has little time to figure out why.
Since when does a machine have to monitor its operator to ensure he/she is "engaged". Ridiculous.
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
Ok, we get it, the driver was Ted Cruzing at the time, and was not fully engaged in observing traffic, or at least not the correct traffic.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
As autonomous cars get better and better, we'll see more and more accidents attributed to driver inattention
Not if we can have a system which is better at driving than a human. In fact, other than the "cool factor" I'm not sure I see the point of a semi-autonomous system which requires me to watch the road all the time since it is no different from driving myself and potentially a lot more annoying. Frankly, it sounds more like paying to debug a final system which will drive itself.
Didn't Tesla say this guy had to acknowledge like seven warnings before the crash?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I don't even own one and I understand it's autopilot feature is far from fool proof. It's classified as assisting but lets get real... If your not paying attention and the car gets in an actsident then your at fault. Period. The system has flaws and your taking your chances. For the same time and number of people driving I think the conclusion is even with it's flaws it's safer and will only keep getting better.
The feature is 100% when your in gridlock freeway traffic.
I actually think all second guessing is holding the technology back from being much safer than it is. We are talking about programming a machine to second guess a couple dozen people at a time. People have trouble with that which is why there is insurance. All you need is for it to be on par with a human driver and then implement no fault for autopilot cars. Keep crunching the numbers and reviewing but so long as there are no cover ups and the system keep getting better then I don't see a problem.
Just let people take the risk.
The NTSB is also expected to find that Tesla Inc could have taken additional steps to prevent the system's misuse
Of course they could have taken additional steps to prevent the system's misuse before the crash because that's exactly what they did right after the crash.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Watching Harry Potter on a portable DVD player when the crash happened played a 'Even More Major Role'.
This is BAD for Tesla. The NTSB basically found fault in the "auto pilot" system's user interface AND it's technical capability. I am NOT surprised by this.
Automatic driving of cars and trunks needs to be thoroughly thought through. Not just the technology required to keep the car on the road, sensing what's going on around it and dealing appropriately with this dynamic environment, but also the complex human factors considerations. Tesla may have the first part working fairly well within the given limits of their sensors, but the second part of this problem hasn't been designed very well.
Human Factors engineering has only recently been a consideration for *real* auto pilots (those in aircraft) and flight automation systems. And it has become clear that all the automation in aircraft has given us great efficiency and smooth operation a the cost of inexperienced pilots with poor flying skills who don't recognize when something is gravely wrong until it is too late. They trust the automation, because it just works, at least until it doesn't, and something really bad happens that was easily preventable. The folks over at the NTSB are very familiar with this issue because there have been a number of notable commercial aircraft crashes where this was a contributing factor, where the automation failed to do what the pilot expected and a crash happened in a perfectly flyable aircraft.
Tesla has a serious level of risk with this feature. It may be wiz bang cool and Musk may love calling it an "autopilot" but the legal liability is huge unless they can keep people from crashing while it's on. The NTSB's statements here are NOT going to bode well for Tesla's legal liability and all the EULA's in the world won't stop the lawsuits when crashes happen.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You can't have it both ways. Really, you can't. Either the car is driving or the person is driving. Expecting that a person will let the car drive AND ALSO stay 100% ready to take over is just not reality. If you are not the one in control, then your mind will not focus on it. Driving is boring enough as it is, expecting someone to babysit a semi-autonomous car is way beyond what we can expect people to do.
Just as an example, 9 years ago when I got my fully loaded Infiniti G37S with technology package, it was one of the first vehicles to have laser-controlled intelligent cruise control. It can match speeds of the cars in front and actively adjust, even brake if necessary. And just that ONE feature of driving assistance sounded like it would be very useful. OMG no. I tried many times to use it and found that just fully automated speed control was enough to disengage me from being an active driver. I could not adapt to it and ultimately decided I would never use it again. It was simply unsafe! Regular cruise control- no problem, I have to pay attention and I bump the speed up and down manually with the thumb control and take other action when necessary. But as soon as that was taken away from me, it became nearly impossible to stay attentive, even though I still had to steer!
Now, maybe different brains work differently and some people can handle semi-automation, but I know I can't. So don't even TRY to give me a car that can sorta drive itself and expect ME to be the ultimate failsafe... that just isn't going to happen. And I expect I am far, FAR from alone in this.
We have more control over our users cars than ever before! But we accept zero liability. Fuck you, it's your problem.
Now trust us and buy our autonomous cars with autopilot for lots n lots of money! We're green! You want to be green don't you?
Only evil monsters are not green! and eco! we're that too! buy our car right now even tho we can't deliver it for years!
YOU DON'T WANT TO BE LEFT OUT! BUY TODAY!
Not quite. Heavies all have TCAS, which is transponder based and will make a loud sound if anything gets to near.
However, large flocks of Canadian Geese do not have transponders and so are not picked up by TCAS, and require human eyes to see. However, human pilots often do not look out the window either, as several people discovered a few years ago when they went for an unexpected swim in the Hudson river.
I could easily see how taking away speed control is enough to let your mind wander.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I fully believe that autonomous driving is possible in 99% of the cases. Autonomous vehicles are not a new thing, research and experiments have been conducted in this domain at least since the 1980s. Self-driving cars have been running on German and Italian roads since the mid-1990s.
However, this technology in consumer cars is another story. It is between expensive and very expensive right now, and will likely continue to be for some time. This is also a complex system that needs to be monitored and maintained. This will change the way we see automobiles and will not be mainstream for at least another decade, if only to let a large enough number of these cars on the road to see a positive effect on statistics.
The driver of the Tesla already had shown irresponsible behaviour on youtube when using his Tesla, so it all was the drivers fault, not Tesla. You cannot do anything against stupidity.
None of this should have come as a surprise to Tesla or anyone who thought about this for a moment. Driver boredom and inattentiveness is an obvious consequence of sitting someone behind a wheel while the car seems to do everything (except not crash into a semi). The car has to monitor and force attentiveness and if the human doesn't give it then the car needs to "punish" them by disengaging those systems.
It's not rocket science...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
"because it allows drivers to avoid steering or watching the road for lengthy periods of time."
This is the key. If you sell a system that isn't capable of full autonomous driving then there must be some way to ensure the drive is still fully engaged in driving and to disable the system at any point the driver is not fully engaged. You can't just tell drivers that they need to watch the road (with a wink and a nod) when using the "self-driving autopilot". It's either fully capable of driving itself or not, and if not then it needs systems to make sure the driver is watching the road at least as well as the average driver on the road.
Some near-infrared bad could travel through the plastic used by cheap sunglasses, and the eyes could be a little bit more visible to the camera than the typical RGB visible domain.
Also, even if you don't see the eyes, you have a general estimate of the driver attention by looking at which direction the driver's face is facing.
(i.e.: chance are low that the driver will spent watching a hour-long Harry Potter movie while glancing sideways. - for comfort the driver will eventually turn the head toward the DVD player, at which moment the car can determine that the driver isn't paying attention to the road anymore)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Finally, proof that the driver was not watching the road but instead was watching a movie on a portable DVD player. So many naysayers tried to blame Tesla for that idiot's callous concern for human safety.