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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.
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.
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.
Baloney. It is very deep learning driven by neural networks. Why do you think they call them neural nets? neural net=human brain. Now that computers have mastered Go and Chess, they are going to replace bartenders and programmers and lawyers. After all, my computer is much faster than the one that I had 20 years ago. It is inevitable.
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.
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.
Wrong.. Humans drive cars in all kinds of weather and locations. The self driving tech currently can only do it in very specific circumstances and locations. So you have to compare the number of miles driven between accidents in only these circumstances.
Also, any time a self driving car needs operator intervention needs be counted as an accident. Why? Because there would have been one without operator intervention. Of course that won't happen because it would show the current crop as what they are, unsafe and not ready for use on the road.
"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.
If the car had "several visual and one audible hands-on warning" then maybe the autopilot should bring the car to a halt. However I suspect that what happened was more complicated and that we do not know the full story.
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).
Better yet, another story is saying that the man has noticed autopilot having a problem at this particular stretch of road In the past - if you've seen it trying to send you into a k-rail at that bit a few times, what the fuck are you doing letting it drive on that bit, and not paying attention when it tells you to? Did he fall asleep or something?
I sure as shit wouldn't be using it there if I've gone so far as to take it to the service center to have them look at it for trying to drive into exactly that barrier in the past...
Man: Hey Doc, when I shove my head up my ass, I have problems breathing!
Doctor: then pull your head out of your ass, and stop shoving it up there!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
as the car is driving down route 101, do you honestly expect the computer onboard to STOP the car, right there? in many cases, there is not even a pullover (lay-by) lane.
I'd like to know what you propose, when the computer says 'I need you to do something, I'm not sure what I should do, myself' and the human ignores it for too long. stopping is NOT always the right thing! the correct answer is 'it depends'.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
... or maybe you're not holding the wheel tight enough.
Well, he did work at Apple. Not holding it right is a distinct possibility...
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.
In ccase of Googles Go and Chess, ANNs it is deep learning.
Deep learning only means you have a relatively deep artificial neural network, and train it.
Depp means: many layers.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
if you've seen it trying to send you into a k-rail at that bit a few times, what the fuck are you doing letting it drive on that bit, and not paying attention when it tells you to?
If he was a computer programmer, I'd say he was trying to reproduce the fault, in order to better understand the entry conditions. :/
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Maybe he should have upgraded to 8.2 beta instead. Christ.
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.
Does the wheel fight you so hard that you can't override it in an emergency? Ditto the brakes? Because if not, I would have a hard time believing that he was paying any attention to the road, which is the entire point of the whole "keep your hands on the wheel" thing.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
as the car is driving down route 101, do you honestly expect the computer onboard to STOP the car, right there? in many cases, there is not even a pullover (lay-by) lane.
I appreciate that ... but it is a case of the least worse thing to do. Yes: stopping on a busy motorway would get a lot of people annoyed at him and honking their horns - but he would still be alive -- assuming that the guy in the car behind him was not asleep as well. In engineering there is a concept of Fail safe, when I was taught to drive: stopping was the fail-safe action; embarrassing and might get you a ticket, but usually better than continuing to move forwards.
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.
How many people are going to die before we are there? 3.22 trillion miles driven and humans have 16,000 accidents a month. They drive over 550K miles without getting in an accident in all weather and road conditions. Let's give Waymo the benefit of the doubt and say they achieve 7000 miles per interaction, that's still only 1.8% the safety of a human *in ideal conditions*; how many injuries and deaths have there been already to get to this point?
People understand the risk of driving and they drive. What people don't understand is how long it will take to make these cars workable.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
as the car is driving down route 101, do you honestly expect the computer onboard to STOP the car, right there? in many cases, there is not even a pullover (lay-by) lane.
One workaround might be to turn on the hazard lights for the benefit of other drivers and in a loud voice state "DISENGAGING DRIVING ASSIST, TAKE CONTROL NOW". Then disengage power.
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.
After repeated warning, it does stop the car.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Is it true that Bio-Matter has no gender?
That story was incorrect. He had taken his car in because of problems with the navigation system, unrelated to autopilot. How that morphed into “autopilot problems at that particular stretch” is a classic example of the telephone game.
Where does 101 not have a pullover lane? I'm trying to remember the entire length, and I thought there were at least bike lanes the whole way.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
Uber plowed into a pedestrian at full speed on a well lit road, whereas this driver ignored six seconds of warnings to take control.
Oh god, imagine how much you could freak people out by replacing the standard autopilot-engagement sound files with "KILL ALL HUMANS" ;)
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
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..."
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?
US-101 is a major highway. You do not have bike lanes on a major highway.
On the left side of the road, along the stretch in question, there is nowhere to pull over. For much of it, the concrete barrier comes right up to the lane. In a few spots, there's a gap of a few feet.
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.
Truly, you are this generations comedian. Nobody else would have ever thought to make this joke. It was absolutely not the most low-hanging fruit whatsoever.
Welcome to Slashdot! Can I take your coat, please?
Apple is all about arrogance. It's what they sell.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
yes, especially if its in the fast lane of the motorway. Turning the radio on and loud might be better
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
"Deep" for an ANN is maybe 20 levels with a few thousand neurons. The human brain has 100 billion neurons with approx 100 trillion connections between them. However well current ANNs may do on a single task , thats all they can do. Train the same network to do a 2nd task and it'll forget how to do the 1st task properly if it remembers at all. An ANN is little more than a highly complex summed weights if - then tree and they are a VERY long way from giving birth to general AI - ie an AI system that can learn multiple tasks like a biological brain with little to no reduction in efficiency of learnt current skills when learning new ones. And thats before we get on to creativity which is a whole other topic.
Oh look, another kid who can't drive and wants a machine to do it for him. Don't worry son, they'll come up with an AI arse wiper for people like you too soon.
Fanboys: "But can't you see!? Elon's tech will save the day. I want to see the show when I push it."
Really guys, enough with the silly YouTubes of you abusing your AutoPilots just to prove some kind of point.
"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.
You're right. There's just the protected ones on US-101
http://www.keyt.com/news/santa...
Anyway, I was thinking of HWY 1, which most definitely has bike lanes (at least here on the Central Coast).
You are welcome on my lawn.
Heck, if you've been on the road for any time you'd know that humans drive _extremely_ unsafe in degraded conditions. Way too little spacing and outside of their visual range.
if you come to a complete stop at ANY time other than the wee-hours of the morning, and maybe even then, you WILL cause a crash.
How many of those are fender-benders rather than fatal?
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...
I worry about any driver that voluntarily drives a car which they have seen experience undesirable behaviour with regards steering, disabling functions without cause and/or unnecessary warnings.
Sorry, no I don't. Please drive off the road and hit a wall. But please do make sure that you take no-one else with you, because those are the people I actually *worry* about.
As far as I'm concerned, Tesla drivers are as much to blame for using, encouraging, excusing and ignoring these features as the cars are for having them.
"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'
_Everybody_ tailgates in the bay area. I'm surprised it was only two. Likely only the traffic going down the off ramp was blocked/involved.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
People drive 3.22 trillion miles a year
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I own one of the first cars with cruise control. It's a 1960, so almost 60 years ago.
It works by pushing up from under the gas pedal. You have to keep your foot on it.
That's a conservative design. Tesla should shock the driver in the balls/labia with increasing voltage if they take their hands off the wheel or eyes off the road.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The point is... whether stopping is the right move or not, shouldn't the automation be prepared to do the right thing to minimize damage? Surely 'carrying on at usual speed' is not the right thing to do.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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 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.
Reproducing a failure is good, but when it puts lives in the line: your own and others, you dont just do it. Iâ(TM)ve had power supplies blow up and shoot fire, you bet I filled out the paperwork and we found a safe way to repro.
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.
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.
Not really no. Deep artificial neural networks are very good at some specific, well defined tasks like playing Chess or Go, or recognising faces in good conditions. Car driving is so far too complex.
Maybe he trusted and liked Tesla, and wanted to help them. In some way, maybe he even wanted to break through their disbelief and apathy at his complaint -- perhaps by noting how far it veered before correcting itslef. Or maybe, he just forgot to turn off the dangerous autopilot POS system which lulls you the diver into apathy, and then arbitrarily kills you.
Seriously, how many lives will be lost before autopilot starts slowing the car down to a safe stop, honking and flashing when it knows when driver is disengaged. For all it knows, maybe the driver had a heart attack behind the wheel and died !!!
Instead, Tesla knowlingly lets loose a misguided weapon on the roads.
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
Stop making self driving cars that compromise a driver's attention.
The problem is worse than self-driving cars. The idiots who design cars put in all kinds of crap for morons so that the morons can play rather than concentrate on driving. The U.S. government has failed to protect the public by allowing drivers to be distracted by all the childish crap. Grow up, people. Either pay attention and drive or get out and walk.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.