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Tesla Says Autopilot Was Engaged During Fatal Model X Crash (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Tesla says Autopilot was engaged at the time of a deadly Model X crash that occurred March 23rd in Mountain View, California. The company posted a statement online late Friday, after local news reported that the victim had made several complaints to Tesla about the vehicle's Autopilot technology prior to the crash in which he died. After recovering the logs from the crash site, Tesla acknowledged that Autopilot was on, with the adaptive cruise control follow distance set to a minimum. The company also said that the driver, identified as Apple engineer Wei "Walter" Huang, had his hands off the steering wheel and was not responding to warnings to re-take control. Tesla said in a statement: "The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive and the driver's hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision. The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken."
According to Mercury News, the driver of the car was headed southbound on California's Route 101 when his Model X crashed headfirst into the safety barrier section of a divider that separates the carpool lane from the off-ramp to the left. "The front end of his SUV was ripped apart, the vehicle caught fire, and two other cars crashed into the rear end. [The driver] was removed from the vehicle by rescuers and brought to Stanford Hospital, where he died from injuries sustained in the crash."
According to Mercury News, the driver of the car was headed southbound on California's Route 101 when his Model X crashed headfirst into the safety barrier section of a divider that separates the carpool lane from the off-ramp to the left. "The front end of his SUV was ripped apart, the vehicle caught fire, and two other cars crashed into the rear end. [The driver] was removed from the vehicle by rescuers and brought to Stanford Hospital, where he died from injuries sustained in the crash."
Tesla said in a previous article that autopilot had done this route 85,000 times. I guess repetition doesn't necessarily mean success here. Big surprise.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
So the driver didn't have their hands on the wheel? Sounds like evolution in action...
IT HAS BEGUN !!
He apparently had plenty of money; he was driving a Tesla. He was an engineer, so he was educated.
It amazes me that often people don't recognize that driving a car is a potentially extremely dangerous activity. 100% attention is required at all times, particularly since other drivers often do things they shouldn't do.
AI and deep learning neural networks perform better than humans. We all know this. After all "neural network" is like a brain, that is why they use those terms, and we all know that computers are faster than humans! Thus, "neural networks" must be better than the human brain. Since computers get better and better every year, it is inevitable. Computers play Chess and Go better than Grand Masters. Finally "deep learning" is really deep. You think you learned deep before? That is nothing like how deep these deep learning neural nets can get.
So you design a car that can safely drive itself in traffic, can track whether the driver is actively using the controls and knows that for six seconds the driver hasn't been using them while driving at speeds the car can't protect them through a crash.
And you didn't design in, "Slow the fuck down because nobody is in control of the vehicle"?
The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken.
Having narrowly avoided two separate impending collisions while driving due to insects, one hornet loose in the cab & one bee in the eye through an open window, I have a macabre fascination with the last few seconds in a vehicle before the collision the takes the life of the human witness(es).
Sure, we live in an age of unrivaled electronic distractions, but there have always been ample incentive to pick the wrong five seconds to look away from the road. Outside of law enforcement, we'd never see the video, even if it did exist... but the new tech vehicles are getting makes the 'fly on the wall' view ever more likely.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Huang reportedly complained that the car’s Autopilot option kept veering the car toward the same barrier on Highway 101, near Mountain View, into which he crashed the car last Friday.
If you've noticed unsafe behaviour and have made complaints about it, why the fuck would you keep using it?
Not surprising that an Apple engineer has no common sense.
And the only common sense thing for Tesla to do is to disable the damn thing. People are too stupid to be trusted with anything.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Considering Tesla pushed a significantly updated autopiliot at that time (8.1 vs 8.0). Do we know if it was the new version that caused the accident or the old version?
That's what Google, to its credit, has been saying since day one. Autopilot is either a safety backup system like Meritor Onguard, or it's totally in control. Driving is not a dificult task, it's no easier to monitor a computer driving than it is to drive. Consequently if people aren't driving they are looking at their cell phones.
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
... or maybe you're not holding the wheel tight enough. Get your ass-backwards attitude off the road before it kills somebody.
So autopilot killed someone a week after an automated Uber car did. In the same amount of time, human drivers killed thousands of other people.
Self-driving cars already safer per passenger mile driven than the person driven kind. Learn from this mistake and improve the technology. The same way we did with every other transportation method over the past several thousand years
The company also said that the driver, identified as Apple engineer Wei "Walter" Huang, had his hands off the steering wheel and was not responding to warnings to re-take control.
Clearly, he was holding it wrong.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have had an X for about 6 months and use autopilot alot. Sometimes the autopilot refuses to believe my hands are actually on the steering wheel. I put this out there cause I do not completely believe the statement about his hands not being on the wheel. Otherwise I love my x - but it does sometimes do crazy crap when in autopilot - things like always pulling left when I go under a certain toll point on the freeway, and disengaging autopilot at the lowest point in a freeway tunnel. It also does not like trucks that have flappy sides when the wind is blowing. Slightly neurotic, but usually enjoyable.
Actually tesla said the driver ignored the warning earlier in the drive. It could have been an hour before.
Tesla autopilot warns you to take control every minute or so regardless of whether it is "confused" or not. If you don't, after sufficient warnings, it stops the car.
There is no information in the Tesla statement that isn't true of many many tesla autopilot journeys.
It looks to me, as a Tesla owner myself, that autopilot did, indeed, drive him into the barrier and that we have a reminder that every time a driver looks away when on autopilot, they gamble with their life.
"Schooled" hardly means "educated" and "educated" definitely doesn't imply "informed" or "intelligent," as evidenced by this twit's (moment of silence) decision.Besides, no "computer engineer" (i.e. someone with a deep understanding of both analog and digital logic) would be willing to trust their lives to a cutting-edge machine that'st being tested not in a controlled environment but rather a fucking city.
On average there are 700 deaths on US roads EVERY week and two more should not be national news. With safer cars this number has been dropping in the last decade but this is news is actually about computer AI making a choice, or by not making a choice, killing two people. It may not be full AI, but it is still a computer program in control. Two people died because of a computer program. With both accidents the "self-driving" AI program should have saved these people. Both times the person behind the wheel should have been able to avoid or lessen the collision if they were actually driving. We don't hear much about AI driving success in avoiding crashes just like we don't hear about planes that land safely. We only hear about failures. These features will get better with time and debugging (meaning more failures to come). Just as early commercial planes had their problems so does AI self-driving. For now flying is safer than driving no matter who is in control of the car (0 commercial aviation deaths for 2017 in US) and improved technology can only help our chances of making it home safely even if it makes the wrong choice occasionally (well, on average).
Meanwhile, thousands of people continue to die due to human drivers every single day. Just dropping like flies. And yet there are people who continue to believe that automated vehicle development should somehow be impeded. Fuck those people.
... or maybe you're not holding the wheel tight enough.
Well, he did work at Apple. Not holding it right is a distinct possibility...
Sounds like suicide.
Six seconds is pushing the brake to the floor and being at a complete stop, with plenty of room to spare; even more time to slightly turn the wheel to avoid hitting something 150m away and not moving.
Driver not paying attention AT ALL.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
This situation is truly unfortunate. That being said, if we were all driven by computers (no humans) I bet the number of overall accidents would be far less. Accidents are just that, accidents. Condolences to the family. I ordered a Model 3 two days ago. Wife and I decided against the Auto Pilot mostly because of the added expense. I believe the auto pilot concept is great, I'm going to give it a little more time to mature.
The driver had set the following distance at the minimum which sounds like an unsafe decision. I have a Subaru with smart cruise control which allows setting the follow distance which is speed dependent. I set it on the maximum which is very close to my normal follow distance. Any less would seem too risky for me to respond to unexpected events ahead. I don't know if the stated 150 meters was sufficient warning based on his speed (unknown?). Clearly the driver should have been driving. 150 meters is likely sufficient distance to reduce speed enough to survive. Still the software should be studied to see why it allowed a car to run into a concrete divider at high speed. If there is not sufficient visibility the autopilot should refuse to drive and allow the driver to take his life in his own hands. Maybe in a few years the autopilot will be better than a human and simply not allow the car to be driven when it is unsafe.
Ray Seyfarth, ray.seyfarth@gmail.com, http://rayseyfarth.blogspot.com
Reading and re-reading the quote from Tesla, I see I was mislead:
The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive and the driver's hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision. The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken."
This does not mean that the warning fired during the 6-seconds prior to the collision. It wasn't telling him a collision was imminent. It says that "earlier in the drive" it warned him. So the warning could have been 45 minutes prior. Also, it sounds like the autopilot warning happens any time the user takes their hands off the wheel, not just when it needs help. It might be that autopilot drivers have a tendency to ignore the warning, like a dialog box that comes up so often people just click "OK" to it.
I begin to think that a semi-autopilot is a bad idea. If it is not reliable enough that a person can take their hands off the wheel, and they still must pay full attention to the road in case it makes a mistake, then they might as well drive? It is very hard to pay attention to something you aren't actively involved in. Airline pilots and lifeguards and factory quality inspectors know this. Those industries have specific policies and practices designed to keep people engaged and aware.
With a name like "autopilot" it's completely understandable. And the fact that he was an Apple engineer means nothing. It's 50/50 whether he was a hard-nosed nerd who knew enough to tell you how it worked to ten decimal places or whether he was a start-eyed utopian who believed all the propaganda. The summary implies the latter.
New classification of death - robotic process.
By algorithm, metaphor and processing machine made choice was fatal. This post reality dawn of an age where humans are given a metaphor stand-in for reality to represent risk. Tesla chose to use a sound to implement a warning. What could go wrong? Did he have windows down and couldn't hear? Maybe cabin noise was chaotic or distracting but the metaphor implementation failed the human-in-control.
SO the cost of that weak metaphor is catastrophic. I think thou dost NOT protest e-nuff.
Tesla now has a second fatal whose pattern of failure the company claims is a metaphor " warning" by sound. AND if I am not mistaken the steering wheel concurrently implements haptic feedback begging attentive action.
First Principles: Review the algorithm. Deconstruct the metaphor adequacy. Rerun processing simulation to refine out the pattern of failure by warning sound proven so ineffective so as to be catastrophic to vehicle operation to cause fatality.
"...the victim had made several complaints to Tesla about the vehicle's Autopilot technology prior to the crash...
So the guy who has complained not once, but repeatedly, that his car's autopilot is inadequate engages it and completely ignores what it's doing.
This takes a special kind of stupid.
Somehow I found the strength to ignore the low-hanging fruit: that this potential Darwin Award winner was an Apple engineer.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
A dazed driver cannot assume responsibility of a ton of steel travelling fast down the highway within five seconds!
In fact, studies has shown that a driver is not "up to speed" in driving capability for a long time after a requested activation, up to 40 seconds.
Having a five second limit is simply irresponsible, and 40 seconds is almost same AD challenge as a level 4 system.
Abolish level 3!
Well thats one way to shut up a complainer.
I agree these would be better numbers for grading Tesla.
You can't make the comparison using news stories though, because when a Tesla crashes without Autopilot engaged it's just another car crash. It doesn't make national news. This makes the numbers appear slanted against Autopilot.
Comments like that really aren't helpful at this stage, and could be deeply hurtful if any of the victim's friends or family read them. Please engage your brain before posting.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Um, success? So... yay?
Six seconds is pushing the brake to the floor and being at a complete stop, with plenty of room to spare; even more time to slightly turn the wheel to avoid hitting something 150m away and not moving.
Driver not paying attention AT ALL.
Six seconds is the amount of time the driver was not engaging the steering wheel. We do not know how much time there was after the car veered out of the traffic lane and before it hit the barrier, it my have been much less.
The Death Pilot in those Deathla cars kills you but it's totally the drivers fault for taking his hands off the wheel for 6 seconds.
Weasel words form Tesla about the driver receiving warnings earlier in the drive - no mention how much earlier it was to the time of the accident....
The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken.
Same for the autopilot you fucking idiots.
If there's a general consensus in the English speaking world that autopilot is synonymous with autonomous, I agree the name was poorly chosen. That's not my impression of the general understanding of the word – we expect a pilot to remain in the cockpit and alert when the plane we're on is on autopilot, after all – but if the data shows otherwise then I'd be the first to argue for the feature to have its name changed.
Sorry Tesla, I support you, I'd love to own one of your cars, and I completely understand that it's impossible to design a car that prevents a reckless driver from killing himself or others; however blaming the world a priori for what could be intrinsic problems of your undoubtedly excellent products is inelegant. Just market the autopilot as a safety feature and not as a driver replacement.
How come there is no indication of how fast he was going ? After I test-drove the X, I canceled my booking as I was unsatisfied with the fact that the AP was at a low level, and could only handle a max of 40mph which I found ridiculous. But the main reason I was unhappy - it kept going over the double yellow multiple times and this idiot young salesman next to me says 'hey great, they like your tesla!' when the car coming from opposite honked at me thinking I was gonna run him down
Just drive a car. Get better at it. Use the aides built into them. Stop making self driving cars that compromise a driver's attention.
But why would anyone trust it to drive them to work?
Uber plowed into a pedestrian at full speed on a well lit road, whereas this driver ignored six seconds of warnings to take control.
The last thing heard on the car's cockpit voice recorder was the AI saying, "Don't make me pull this car over!" In my dad's voice.
Have gnu, will travel.
Maybe he installed a big notch in the middle of his windshield, and he couldn't see the barrier through it ;)
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Tesla has poor temperature control, and gives everything a metallic taste.
I'm putting my money on Weber.
Keepin the hope alive worked out for Amazon shareholders, Tesla stock owners are hoping for the same. Yeah, sure, Ford is talking about how they're planning on spending billions on EV's and Volvo has plans to ditch gas vehicles entirely - but at this point they're just plans. They could also enter a partnership with another automaker if necessary, like Honda.
The driver had complained about trouble with his car to Tesla before the fatal crash:
"Walter Huang's family tells Dan Noyes he took his Tesla to the dealer, complaining that -- on multiple occasions -- the auto-pilot veered toward that same barrier -- the one his Model X hit on Friday when he died."
If his Tesla has a history of doing something reckless, why would he re-enable it? Why would he also not have your hands on the wheel? Why didn't Tesla analyzed the data in his car when he reported this to see what was going on? Seems like it would have been a pretty simple check: Did the car attempt to steer the car towards the barrier or not?
If you work for Apple and drive a Tesla, you need this App.
How close is the minimum setting on a Tesla? I.e. what is reasonable to use in that part of the world?
My only modern adaptive cruise control experience was on a rented late model Ford on a road trip. IIRC the default setting was about right for me, but I moved one settings lower in heavier traffic closer to the cities.
Do you use traditional cruise control? Because that is more dangerous than Autopilot. People crash all the time while cruise control is engaged and they pay less attention to the road, just like this case. Autopilot and adaptive cruise control are much better than dumb cruise control. Why is this different? I noticed most of the comments here on Slashdot must be from people who have never even used Autopilot, so how can they understand how it works, what is said about it to the driver etc? You are just speculating. First, it has never been presented *in the current form* as completely self driving. Non-Tesla owners see typical media headlines about futures which are not what is in the car today. And of course the car didn't warn of the barrier, if it saw the barrier it wouldn't have hit it. What it does is nag you every so often if you aren't touching the wheel and providing resistance to the turning with your hand. If there is something that the software can't figure out, it warns you with several beeps/flashing to immediately take control. But given the widely stressed point that it isn't perfect, there are cases that it could hit something and not warn before hand because it didn't know there was an issue. Just like a driver who has an accident. Note the word "accident". My Tesla is three years old. I've been using Autopilot since it was first released. It's not perfect, just like Tesla re-iterates constantly. This guy was almost surely texting on his phone or browsing on it. Those accidents happen all the time with or without Autopilot. My elderly parents were hit by a girl as they walked in a crosswalk last year. They recovered, but she clearly must have been texting on her phone. The technology most implicated in these crashes is the smartphone, not Autopilot.
It isn't ready for prime time. It probably never will be, not fully. Some other solution to driving related issues will come along and we will forget anyone was ever pursuing this. It'll look like the flying cars people were trying to build in the 1940s and 50s one day, and we'll go, 'What were we thinking?'.
based on 2016 stats, roughly 100 other people also died in non-autopilot accidents THAT SAME DAY.
yes, driving is dangerous.
"The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning..."
Bah... just Tesla's lawyers being weenies again. Ignore!
There are plenty of examples of people crashing with normal cruise control for example see this.
Suicide by Tesla!
I haven't seen anybody highlight that piece of the puzzle.
This guy stated there were all kinds of issues with autopilot, but then chose to use the minimum cruise control follow distance. Maybe his REAL problem was just bay area traffic and assholes cutting in front of him. Maybe somebody did that which lead to the accident.
The interesting part to me is that two cars crashed into him from behind after he hit the center divider. That implies at least 3 drivers weren't paying attention to the and other drivers around them, in my experience.
about Cruise Control 30+ years ago.
And yet today every car has it standard from the factory.
Just because a tool doesn't account for everything doesn't mean it isn't useful when used properly and quite dangerous to the individual when used improperly. Just think about a hammer, hatchet, or chain saw. And for those who go 'this isn't a good analogy', it actually is, since improper use of these tools could severely injure yourself or others, just like using autopilot without providing it consistent human oversight. It is there to reduce strain on the human body involved with the task it is assigned, but it still requires a human observing the work or bad things can happen.
A boring few minutes in google maps shows many stretches of the 101 with a lane on the right hand side separated from the main carriageway by a thick white line and a total absence of vehicles in it. Presumably they put that in because they had some spare asphalt, as opposed to maybe expecting people to stop in it if necessary.
https://www.google.com.au/maps...
"It looks to me, as a Tesla owner myself, that autopilot did, indeed, drive him into the barrier and that we have a reminder that every time a driver looks away when on autopilot, they gamble with their life."
Who cares about their life? What about that of their passengers and other road users?
Best thing to happen here? Only the idiot who made the decisions to a) use this model of car, b) enable said features, c) place their life on them is the one who died.
Hopefully, things like that will adjust other people's driving so that they don't kill people.
You want to take risks? Kill yourself. Nobody else.
The car...Wanted to be a roadster. Couldn't stand the shame of being a mall utility vehicle.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
could be deeply hurtful
Don't give a fuck, they are only words. Stop crying and go grow some balls.
Hey! Some stereotypes are true #noasiannascardrivers
Tesla's biggest increases in safety record come just after events like this one. Coincidence? I think not.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The impact caused Huangâ(TM)s vehicle to catch fire, the CHP added. Moments later, an approaching Mazda and Audi hit the 2017 Tesla Model X.
What's in a Tesla that could ignite and cause a fire?
What does money have to do with the subject? Or is it because rich people "deserve" to die?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The name was not poorly chosen, because the feature performs very similarly to the aircraft function with the same name - it will semi-autonimously control the vehicle and follow a pre-planned route. Autopilot on a B200 will happily fly you into the side of a mountain if it is set to maintain current heading and altitude as you approach it. Just like the Tesla it will warn the pilot of threats and urge manual control, and both systems result in predictably negative outcomes when those warnings are ignored.
"And again, given that the driver was an Apple engineer, it would be very surprising if he were not intelligent and competent."
A negation is missing from the sentence above. Can you spot it ?
The current Tesla system is not an autopilot, calling it that is part of what is causing these accidents. At best it is an form of advanced driving assistant.
The numbers from Tesla are, of course, nothing more than a work of fiction. My Model X is constantly screaming at me to put my hands on the wheel even when I'm gripping it with an iron grip in spots where I expect the autosteer to do something exceptionally stupid.
Unfortunately, the Tesla's notion of whether your hands are on the wheel or not comes from whether you are resisting the autosteer, which most sane drivers do not do unless the autosteer is doing something dubious. With the latest firmware (2018.10.4), the autosteer doesn't suck hopelessly (unlike the previous firmware version), so there's no reason to actively resist it most of the time.
In other words, saying that he didn't interact with the wheel for six seconds just means it was more than six seconds since the car last steered hard enough to surprise him. It has little to no bearing on whether his hands actually were or were not on the wheel. I'm growing more and more concerned, now that I've experienced a Tesla with autosteer, wondering how many of the previous accidents in which Tesla claimed driver inattention might have not involved inattention at all.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Well, right. But that makes it look even better. If the system is only used in 50% of driving conditions and eliminates 40% of ALL accidents, then it must be preventing a HUGE percentage of the accidents that were going to happen in that 50% of all driving.
This is especially true if accidents become more common as driving conditions deteriorate, which I take as a given.
I guess it becomes less true if Teslas are generally driven less in those deteriorating conditions. I have no real reason to believe this is so, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out that some Tesla owners pamper their cars and only take them out when it's nice.
Sorry, but you have to consider all possibilities. Suicide is one of them. Although, if I were committing suicide, my hands would be firmly on the wheel. I wouldn't be trusting autopilot to drive me into a barrier when it's designed to avoid doing that sort of thing.
So probably not suicide. I reckon he just fell asleep.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
I apologize for the length of this post. It is as much about trying to state my thoughts clearly as it is about participating in a conversation.
For all of the following I will assume that the 40% reduction in crashes attributed to Autopilot by NHTSA is real.
I agree that off-highway driving is where you see the most crashes. Let's break all driving into two types: Autopilotable (P), and Manual-required (M). P includes all miles driven that allow the driver to use Autopilot, M includes the rest.
Let's arbitrarily set the ratio of (P miles driven / total miles driven) to 50%, leaving 50% for M. No, these are not the real numbers, but we can see which way adjustment moves the effectiveness of the Autopilot system. Let's further assume that crashes are evenly distributed between P miles and M miles (which neither of us believes). Let's call this (unrealistic) scenario the Baseline.
Now let's grab a sample of the total miles driven that contains exactly 1000 crashes. 500 of them are in P miles and 500 of them are in M miles. If Autopilot can prevent 40% of ALL of those crashes, then it is preventing 400 crashes. It can't prevent crashes in the M miles at all (it's not in use, by definition), so it must prevent 400 of the crashes in the P miles, of which there are only 500. Preventing 400 out of 500 crashes is preventing 80% of P mile crashes.
But we don't believe that crashes are evenly distributed. We know they are skewed toward the bad conditions and the off-highway miles, the M miles. So, let's move the line a little. We'll say that 55% of the accidents occur in the M miles and only 45% in the P miles.
In our 1000 crash sample, we have 450 in the P miles, 550 in the M miles. 40% of all crashes is still 400 crashes. If Autopilot can stop 400 out of the 450 P mile crashes it is stopping 88.9% of accidents in the P miles, up from 80% in the Baseline scenario. The more the crashes concentrate into the M miles, the better Autopilot has to do in the P miles to make that 40% improvement. This is the reasoning behind my second assertion above:
This is especially true if accidents become more common as driving conditions deteriorate, which I take as a given.
But what about my crazy assumption that P miles and M miles were equal? Seems unlikely to me, but I truly don't know. So, what happens if we move it some? Let's say that P miles account for 60% and M miles only account for 40%. What does this do to our Baseline?
1000 evenly distributed crashes gives us 600 in the P miles and 400 in the M miles. Autopilot's 40% reduction is 400 crashes out of 600 in the P miles (again, these are the only miles where drivers are using Autopilot). In this case Autopilot can apparently prevent 66% of crashes in the P miles. Not bad, but less than our (admittedly arbitrary) Baseline. As P miles become more prevalent, it is easier for Autopilot to make that 40% reduction. This is the reason for my third assertion above:
I guess it becomes less true if Teslas are generally driven less in those deteriorating conditions.
Because I absolutely believe that crashes are concentrated in the M miles, I suspect that P miles are way more common than one would intuitively guess. Or alternatively, it could be that the 40% reduction was not caused by the Autopilot rollout at all, but I am taking the NHTSA at their word. I don't usually see them as knuckleheads, but I have to acknowledge the possibility.
If you read all of that, thanks. I appreciate your viewpoint and I am trying to approach this with an open mind.
It could just be that the later model cars had some safer feature like better visibility or better brakes or something like that.
I fell for the banana in the tailpipe trick.
Who are you? The comment police?
Got news for you. Not everyone gives a crap whether your feelings get hurt, or not. Suicide post above may be spot on, may not be. Only one person knew that for certain, and he's dead.
If you have a problem with people making comments you don't think are appropriate, how about YOU use YOUR brain, and stay out of it.
Good comment! Mod parent UP!!
2 of the most important ideas:
With normal driving, you stay constantly alert. You have fast reaction times.
With Autopilot driving, "you get bored watching the road for an hour with the car driving itself perfectly fine, leaving you nothing to do." That increases your reaction times.
Two fatal collisions featuring self drive cars have happened in the last two weeks. Both due to driver inattention. Unless a semi-autonomous car is better at driving in the prevailing conditions than a human, in all circumstances, you do not let them take their hands off the wheel or allow them to become distracted. Imo safety regulations for semi autonomous vehicles need to be stringent and standardized.
Tesla needs to accept the blame for being a fucking idiot and calling it autopilot!
Comments like that really aren't helpful at this stage, and could be deeply hurtful if any of the victim's friends or family read them. Please engage your brain before posting.
You are mistaken, I am not trying to be helpful to victim's friends or family and this discussion isn't intended to be replacement for a support group. Not everything must be about feelings and healing.
But already better than many drivers I see on the road every day.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Let's compare to how many fatal car accidents we can attribute to humans.
But some robots are just plain evil. Petition: https://www.change.org/p/let-s...
He was warned. You simply can't engineer around a human operator who ignores input from the automated systems. Maybe the real answer to this is to have the Autopilot brake and move to the slower right lane after 2 ignored attempts to get the driver's attention. Even then, drivers will likely ignore input as they're focussed on their phones/tablets/etc.
Organization? You must be joking..
and the lesson is we aren't as smart as we think we are.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Goose: The defense department regrets to inform you that your sons are dead because they were stupid.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/48081edb-c684-4635-b9b5-6e632800813d
Jut about EVERYONE complaining about autopilot complains about it NOT being fully autonomous. Proving the consensus is opposite to your claim, but the DESIRE for it to mean that is dominant. IOW people WANT a car that drives itself totally (in real fact they whine and whinge about how it's bad and that only humans should be allowed to drive, because they're safe and good drivers), nobody says it DOES mean that, only complain that it DOESN'T.
Comments like that really aren't helpful at this stage, and could be deeply hurtful if any of the victim's friends or family read them. Please engage your brain before posting.
Actually that comment makes a very good point and has nothing to do with the victim or his friends, other than perhaps to point out that he could not reasonably have expected his car to suddenly drive into a barrier.
You're essentially saying, "Don't look at the facts of this case, but get emotional instead."