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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.
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
Once we are on the other side of the autonomous creepy valley, sure things will be great and perfect and all that jazz. So far that is a mythical future you can't buy yet.
In the meantime the current crop of systems, and the ones planned for the next several years, all augment the driver rather than replace them. As such driving will be inherently BORING as hell while you are a quasi-passenger in your own car. Bored humans check phones, read email, nod off, watch movies, and other dumb stuff when they are still legally required to be in command and control of the vehicle. Google even admitted their employees were sleeping and working on laptops on the way home in their very beta test fleet (not that they fired them as they should have).
So the upshot is that while these autonomous systems will create this whole new class of collision by zombified drivers, even while potentially lowering the overall rate with their mostly good collision avoidance systems. Drivers will be out of practice and situationally unaware when HAL throws up its hands and gives back control, or when it fails to respond to trucks in the roadway, construction, black ice, pot holes, etc, etc.
So until your car is fully licensed to drive itself, these semi-autonomous systems need to be designed to keep the licensed driver on the ball and paying attention. Of course that takes away 90% of the sex appeal, so I expect the legal/ethical envelope to keep being pushed and more of these new types of crashes to keep occurring.
They'll learn less from them by firing them than by devising methods to stop them doing these things. After all, they can't fire the eventual customers that will also do these things.