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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."
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.
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.
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.
"""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?
It means that it's really hard to make a partially self-driving car that is safe.
People have two mode, driving and not-driving. If the car isn't safe while you're not-driving then the car isn't safe.
I stole this Sig
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.
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.
...unless the chainsaw company names it the Jugglesaw 9000 and markets it with commercials starring chainsaw jugglers.
Cadillac uses eye tracking to monitor the driver's attentiveness.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It's not quite so easy to spot a flock of birds taking off as you reach the critical speed from which you can no longer abort a take-off. The pilot flying the airplane (captain or F/O) does have his or her eyes outside during the take-off roll until lift-off, as this is a completely manual and visual phase. The other pilot is looking at engine parameters, airspeed and a few other instruments and just taking a few occasional glaces outside.
But once you're above the abort speed (v1), there's little you can do about birds. You can't just yank the airplane left or right to avoid them when you're doing 150 knots. We are actually advised not to change our flight path because the birds act in unpredictable ways and violent maneuvers may actually increase the chance of a bird strike with birds dashing off precisely in the same direction you decided to turn towards. Also, it's easier to react to an engine failure if the plane's path is nice and stable rather than while you're violently banking or pitching.