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Tesla Issues Strongest Statement Yet Blaming Driver For Deadly Autopilot Crash (abc7news.com)
Tesla has released its strongest statement yet blaming the driver of a Tesla Model X that crashed on Autopilot almost three weeks ago. The driver, Walter Huang, died March 23rd in Mountain View when his Model X on Autopilot crashed headfirst into the safety barrier section of a divider that separates the carpool lane from the off-ramp to the left. Huang was an Apple engineer and former EA Games employee. ABC7News reports: Tesla confirmed its data shows Walter Huang was using Autopilot at the time of the crash, but that his hands were off the wheel for six seconds right before impact. Tesla sent Dan Noyes a statement Tuesday night that reads in part, "Autopilot requires the driver to be alert and have hands on the wheel... the crash happened on a clear day with several hundred feet of visibility ahead, which means that the only way for this accident to have occurred is if Mr. Huang was not paying attention to the road." The family's lawyer believes Tesla is blaming Huang to distract from the family's concern about the car's Autopilot.
Here is the full statement from Tesla: "We are very sorry for the family's loss. According to the family, Mr. Huang was well aware that Autopilot was not perfect and, specifically, he told them it was not reliable in that exact location, yet he nonetheless engaged Autopilot at that location. The crash happened on a clear day with several hundred feet of visibility ahead, which means that the only way for this accident to have occurred is if Mr. Huang was not paying attention to the road, despite the car providing multiple warnings to do so. The fundamental premise of both moral and legal liability is a broken promise, and there was none here. Tesla is extremely clear that Autopilot requires the driver to be alert and have hands on the wheel. This reminder is made every single time Autopilot is engaged. If the system detects that hands are not on, it provides visual and auditory alerts. This happened several times on Mr. Huang's drive that day. We empathize with Mr. Huang's family, who are understandably facing loss and grief, but the false impression that Autopilot is unsafe will cause harm to others on the road. NHTSA found that even the early version of Tesla Autopilot resulted in 40% fewer crashes and it has improved substantially since then. The reason that other families are not on TV is because their loved ones are still alive."
Here is the full statement from Tesla: "We are very sorry for the family's loss. According to the family, Mr. Huang was well aware that Autopilot was not perfect and, specifically, he told them it was not reliable in that exact location, yet he nonetheless engaged Autopilot at that location. The crash happened on a clear day with several hundred feet of visibility ahead, which means that the only way for this accident to have occurred is if Mr. Huang was not paying attention to the road, despite the car providing multiple warnings to do so. The fundamental premise of both moral and legal liability is a broken promise, and there was none here. Tesla is extremely clear that Autopilot requires the driver to be alert and have hands on the wheel. This reminder is made every single time Autopilot is engaged. If the system detects that hands are not on, it provides visual and auditory alerts. This happened several times on Mr. Huang's drive that day. We empathize with Mr. Huang's family, who are understandably facing loss and grief, but the false impression that Autopilot is unsafe will cause harm to others on the road. NHTSA found that even the early version of Tesla Autopilot resulted in 40% fewer crashes and it has improved substantially since then. The reason that other families are not on TV is because their loved ones are still alive."
I'm just thrilled that these millionaires are doing the beta test for us. In a few years, they'll have most of the bugs worked out and the tech will be a commodity. They are true martyrs for the little man.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
[Emphasis mine] Hands not on the wheel, a clear day with plenty of warnings to pay attention it's like he purposely wanted to crash.
People die while driving to work. Using your argument, no one would ever get into a car.
Yes, Tesla's Autopilot isn't perfect, and its capabilities may be exaggerated, but I believe that, overall, drivers using Autopilot are less likely to get into an accident. Isn't that the real measure?
Tesla's crash rate dropped 40 percent after Autopilot was installed, Feds say
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I don't know, I've seen Telsa autopilot reaction videos on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjGe0GiiFzw), and when they're right, they're dead on right. Their instant reaction is so fast, to human perception it's as if they're predicting the future. I'm positive there are already cases where autopilot has prevented deaths. Unfortunately, I do see the argument that -- both legally and morally -- if you save 100 lives but are at fault for 1, you're still at fault for 1. Tricky situation.
Tesla should be issuing challenges and driver should respond correctly, if not it should pull the car over and stop.
If alert driver is a necessary requirement for safety, the system should check for alertness and stop the car safely if the driver is not alert. It is weaseling out if it allows the car to stay on auto pilot even after its request for manual take over is not honoured. But it knows the appeal of auto pilot will be greatly reduced if it enforces alertness rules
This is why I did not order autopilot when my Model 3 offer came through last Sunday. I am a great supporter of Tesla but the auto pilot is misnamed, and promotion of its use is not correct.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What good is it even if they say you need to keep your hands on the steering wheel? It doesn't sound very auto to me.
I turned on cruise control and it drove right into a stopped car. What good is cruise control if I have to manually slow down? It doesn't sound very "in control" to me.
It seems to me that the only point of having an autopilot would be so that you could take your hands off the wheel and not pay attention to the road. This is sorta-kinda-an-almost-but-not-quite autopilot that works ok most of the time but has failure modes involving death and / or dismemberment. Who the hell would sell a half-assed, half-baked "feature" like this?
It seems to me that the only point of having cruise control would be so that you could take your feet off the pedals and not pay attention to your speed. This is sorta-kinda-an-almost-but-not-quite cruise control that works ok most of the time but has failure modes involving death and / or dismemberment. Who the hell would sell a half-assed, half-baked "feature" like this?
The moral of the story is that when the AI self-driving system starts giving your warning messages about its inability to cope with the current road conditions that you should pay attention to it.
Tesla should know better though. People are fucking idiots and the vehicle should not assume they'll act responsibly. If the AI system doesn't think it can manage things anymore and the user is not responding to input, it should throw the hazard lights on and make an emergency stop. Systems like this should always be able to fail gracefully. If this is a repeated problem, the system should disable the auto-pilot feature and refuse to let the driver use it. If they want it turned back on, they can write to Tesla and explain why they think that they should be allowed to be a colossal moron with a quarter million joules of kinetic energy.
I'm a pilot, been flying for 30 years, and I've flown with other pilots with varying skill and experience levels.
The most experienced pilot I've flown with never took his left hand off the control yoke. I watched him for hours while I was in the co-pilot and jump seats. He'd visit, configure radios, adjust power, but if his left hand ever came off that yoke it went right back on it as soon as the immediate task was done.
I'll drive my Tesla autopilot the same way that gray haired old pilot flew an autopilot, and with any luck I'll live to be just as old.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
All "AUTOPILOT" does is conjure up images of planes flying themselves while pilots LEAVE THE FUCKING COCKPIT to go to the bathroom.
No pilot would ever do that exactly because the autopilot is just a simple program which only controls speed and heading. In the sky, with very few aircraft around you, it would be much safer to leave the controls than it would be in a car, on a highway, and yet aircrew always make sure that there is at least one pilot monitoring the controls at all times. If you hear "autopilot" and think "well, no humans required!" then you are badly misinformed.
Autopilot on the other hand is supposed to keep you in the lane
No, it's not. It's supposed to do a whole bunch of things to assist you, but only if you're paying attention. It was never advertised as a "go to sleep and I'll drive for you" system, any more than cruise control was.
I think it's important to be mindful with your terminology. Tesla's Autopilot is not a self-driving system. It is cruise control. Conflating terminology causes nothing but confusion and undue misconceptions about emerging technologies.
If people stop thinking about Autopilot as self-driving and start thinking about it as cruise control, it becomes immediately obvious that this is not a conversation about why the car did not dodge the obstacle, but rather a conversation about why the human looked away from the road while hurtling forward at great speed in a metal basket, long enough to travel at least 200 meters in distance.
``OK, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah?''
More fundamentally to me is the issue that said car should not drive straight into a wall at full speed without trying to slow down.
There is plenty of blame to go around-- victim, Tesla, Caltrans for starters. Each of them screwed up on at least two levels. Tesla likely needs some kind of way for drivers to flag a spot where the autopilot screwed up, so they can gather data and investigate, because the victim was aware of issues at this location and tried to address it with Tesla in (apparently) multiple occasions to no avail.
What blows my frigging mind though is that the car will drive into a stationary object with high contrast safety striping without attempting to brake. Are they trying to determine approach speed based on visual sensors only that were blinded? Their "neural net" doesn't seem to be learning some important lessons quickly enough.
Perhaps they shouldn't call it autopilot? The term is clearly a marketing term that makes you think it is going to automatically pilot the car. Call it advanced cruise control, or lane assistance.
Also if the car can detect your hands are off the wheel, and it is not capable of guiding itself when your hands are off the wheel then shouldn't it immediately warn you when you do so and come to a safe stop? At what point when the car is moving and you are driving safely are your hands off the wheel.
...at what we believe will be a probability of safety at least twice as good as the average human driver.
The crash happened on a clear day with several hundred feet of visibility ahead, which means that the only way for this accident to have occurred is if Mr. Huang was not paying attention to the road,
So, it was an easily avoidable accident for a human driver... but we have an autopilot that couldn't do it, even though we claim it's twice as safe? Sounds like they are talking out of their asses from both ends here.
The family admits that the driver had had issues at that exact location. Why on earth would he use it there then? Why wasn't he paying attention near that spot? Why did he ignore the warnings? He was a programmer. He should have known.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Cruise control maintains your speed extremely well and doesn't ever fail catastrophically.
Actually it can and does. Cruise control in slippery conditions can put a car into a dangerous condition.
Here's one citation, I'm sure anyone can find more:
https://www.theglobeandmail.co...
Early cruise control systems were sometimes quite dangerous, not always to the passengers but could cause damage to the engine or transmission. I remember cars having a hardwired switch on the dash to disable them, in addition to the software button on the steering wheel, because people learned not to trust them. They got "smarter" and today most will detect wheel slippage and not gun the engine if it hits a slippery spot in the road.
Cruise control is especially dangerous with rear wheel drive and powerful engines, like on a sports car or light truck. One wheel on a slick patch will cause the cruise control to open up the throttle and get the wheels spinning, when they finally find traction the vehicle might no longer be pointed in the desired direction of travel and the front wheels could still be on a slick surface which can send the vehicle flying uncontrolled.
Cruise control is very safe, especially newer ones that integrate with a traction control, but a claim that they never fail catastrophically is provably false.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The terminology issue is a red herring. The reality is that partial self-driving capabilities lull users into a false sense of security because they usually work well. The rare failures are often catastrophic precisely because people have gotten used to the technology working, and end up surprised when it doesn't.
That's what made this recent software update such a problem. It made major changes to the way autosteer works on (at least) AP2-based Tesla cars. One of the big changes was "wide lane" handling, which changed the way vehicles behaved when they encounter a wide lane, such as an exit lane. This has resulted in a number of unexpected behaviors, up to and including cars driving straight towards gore points.
I don't know whether that change was in any way a factor in the autosteer malfunction that led to Mr. Huang's death, because I have no way to know what firmware version that car was running. However, the fact that this major update was in the process of being rolled out to users at the time of the accident is suspicious.
To be fair, a lot of other driving situations got significantly better with that software update. However, Tesla AP's tendency to ignore solid white lines has been an ongoing problem that might well have been made worse by that update; if that is the case, then the problem needs to be corrected ASAP, and they probably should NOT have continued the rollout of that update. Either way, I'm not convinced that Tesla did enough to warn drivers that autosteer might behave very differently, and to be particularly alert after that update.
Also, I would add that, speaking as a Tesla owner, it bothers me to see the amount of spin they're spewing after this accident. I realize that they don't want to let their users get scared into not using AP, because on average, it does significantly reduce accidents. And if there are videos out there showing AP malfunctions that they feel are not genuine, they can and should comment. But they should really stop trying to convince the public that the driver was solely to blame, because IMO, that just isn't the case.
First, the fact remains that autosteer obviously DID malfunction, and that malfunction DID result in a fatality that would NOT have occurred if the vehicle had not been equipped with autosteer functionality (because no sane driver would have looked away from the road for 5+ seconds without that functionality).
Second, the situation was entirely predictable. For at least a decade, people have warned that humans are likely to zone out in partial self-driving situations, and that it isn't really possible to change that innate human tendency. Tesla ignored those warnings and pushed forward anyway, and someone died. They blamed the driver, and the crash investigators tentatively agreed, and they kept pushing forward. And then a second person died. And now a third. IIRC, product liability law hinges in large part on whether user errors are reasonably predictable, and no "I agree to pay attention" can change that fact, which means this is little more than a legal smokescreen, IMO.
Third, the fact also remains that Caltrans failed to reset the safety barrier that was designed to slow down a car before impacting the gore point, after the barrier was collapsed in a wreck nearly two weeks earlier. And the fact remains that had the barrier been reset properly (as is required by law), it is unlikely that Mr. Huang would have died.
In other words, there are three parties, any one of whom/which could have prevented the fatality, and the deceased driver was only one of those three. So it is entirely disingenuous to try to pin this on the driver in the court of public opinion. IMO, it really isn't a question of who is at fault; they all are. Rather, it's a question of wh
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"Victim blame much?"
In this case perfectly justified since the "victim" was an adult with a driving license who was legally REQUIRED to keep his eyes on the road ahead regardless of any self driving capabilities of the car when in charge of a vehicle. Clearly he didn't and he paid the price.
The guy was supposedly smart, and a programmer not some joe sixpack, and was certainly aware that autopilot is not 100% reliable. The only person to blame here is the driver through incorrect operation of the vehicle. If an airliners autopilot made a mistake that the pilot had plenty of time to correct but didn't bother we'd be blaming the pilot, not the automation. Same here.