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A Tesla on Autopilot Crashed Into a Parked Police Car (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Fortune:
A Tesla vehicle in Autopilot mode collided with a parked police cruiser in California, authorities said. The Tesla sedan was driving outbound when it struck a parked Laguna Beach police car, the Laguna Beach police department said Tuesday. According to police, the driver in the Tesla sustained minor injuries. The police cruiser was empty of officers at the time of the crash. Laguna Polic1e Sgt. Jim Cota told the Los Angeles Times the police car "is totaled."
The police sergeant also told the Times that it was the same area where a Tesla crashed into a semi-truck last year, adding "Why do these vehicles keep doing that? We're just lucky that people aren't getting injured."
"Tesla has always been clear that Autopilot doesn't make the car impervious to all accidents," Tesla responded in a statement, "and before a driver can use Autopilot, they must accept a dialogue box which states that 'Autopilot is designed for use on highways that have a center divider and clear lane markings.'"
Record producer Zedd also responded to the news by sharing on Twitter what he calls "the other side": I once fell asleep driving home late at night on the highway (w/ autopilot on) and got woken up by it beeping + turning off music to wake me up. Would have prob been dead without it... I didn't touch the steering wheel for a couple minutes and then it turned off the music and started beeping. Elon Musk responded to the tweet, "Glad you're ok!"
The police sergeant also told the Times that it was the same area where a Tesla crashed into a semi-truck last year, adding "Why do these vehicles keep doing that? We're just lucky that people aren't getting injured."
"Tesla has always been clear that Autopilot doesn't make the car impervious to all accidents," Tesla responded in a statement, "and before a driver can use Autopilot, they must accept a dialogue box which states that 'Autopilot is designed for use on highways that have a center divider and clear lane markings.'"
Record producer Zedd also responded to the news by sharing on Twitter what he calls "the other side": I once fell asleep driving home late at night on the highway (w/ autopilot on) and got woken up by it beeping + turning off music to wake me up. Would have prob been dead without it... I didn't touch the steering wheel for a couple minutes and then it turned off the music and started beeping. Elon Musk responded to the tweet, "Glad you're ok!"
Drop the autopilot name and call it drive assist. The first implies it drives by itself, the second clearly means you still need to be at least holding the steering wheel.
How many humans crashed into parked cars on Tuesday? How many humans crossed double yellow lines and had a fatal head-on collision last month? How many humans didn't see an 18 wheeler turning in front of them and were denogginized?
One makes the news, the other? nothing
if auotpilots aren't advanced enough to sense road boundaries, center lane line, parking spot markers (which this road had), then they aren't advanced enough to drive a car
At least it stopped automatically for the cops.
This happened over a week ago!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The autopilot refused to take a field sobriety test.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
An airplane's autopilot can crash the plane. Either by flying into the side of a mountain, running out of fuel, running into another plane, or into weather conditions the plane can't handle. All possible and even likely if the human pilot does not take responsibility.
And the collection of devices is still called "Autopilot" and have been for more than a half century. Nobody claims that the respective manufacturers have oversold their product and/or delivered defective product.
I mention this because I pointed out this obvious fact when this story popped up on a popular liberal political blog. I was roundly denounced as I was "blaming the victim." Then referred to breitbart.com where apparently that is considered acceptable. Stupid me for expecting better.
So I guess the noisy media circus that goes on any time Tesla is mentioned isn't going to abate anytime soon.
Fords have killed tens of people today and do every day. On any typical day, more than 100 people die in the U.S. from auto accidents while riding in brands other than Tesla. In contrast, a handful of people have died in Teslas.
While the NTSB is interested in batteries and self-driving systems, their announcements of investigations create a false impression that Teslas are more dangerous than other vehicles. The opposite is most likely the case, since a self-driving system, properly used, has the collision-avoiding attention of the driver and of a computer too.
So, why so much bad news about Tesla?
Tesla is also the most shorted stock at present, with short positions covering more than a quarter of all outstanding shares and perhaps as much as one third. That means a great many investors are desperate to see Tesla's stock reach a much lower price soon, or they'll be forced to buy it at its present price in order to fulfill their short positions, potentially bankrupting many of them and sending some out of the windows of Wall Street skyscrapers. These investors are desperately seeding, feeding, and writing negative stories about Tesla in the hope of depressing the stock price. Musk recently taunted them by buying another 10 Million dollars in stock, making it even more likely that there won't be enough stock in the market to cover short positions. If that's the case, short-sellers could end up in debt for thousands of dollars per shorted share -- as the price balloons until enough stockholders are persuaded to sell. Will short-sellers do anything to give Tesla bad press? You bet.
And of course there's the interest of the gasoline industry, which will go out of business given the proliferation of fully-electric vehicles that are actually good enough to compete with gasoline ones, a position that only Tesla holds so far. Entrenched automotive manufacturers also have every reason to seed and feed bad press while they fail to build their own battery manufacturing plants. Before Tesla, one could see the obvious activities of these powers in seeding bad news about the Prius.
Then there's the fact that Tesla does not advertise. Given the queue of Model 3 reservations, Tesla already has all of the sales they need for their next three years of their factory's production, before they might have any economic reason to advertise. This can't be comfortable for the press, and no doubt makes them more willing to carry stories seeded by those who would harm Tesla.
Bruce Perens.
Fortunately for pilots, there are no police cars or concrete dividers in the sky. Unfortunately for Tesla drivers, they are plentiful on the ground.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
"Autopilot is designed for use on highways that have a center divider and clear lane markings."
The GPS knows where the car is, and just about every mapping software knows what kind of road you're on.
So how hard would it be to have the Tesla's computer not even turn on the autopilot if they're not on a road with center divider and clear lane markings? Or better yet, the autopilot only runs on roads that have been certified "not screwed up".
In this case he was on Laguna Canyon Road, which has a median in some places and a middle "suicide lane" in others, and varies from one to two lanes from place to place.
Fortunately for pilots, there are no police cars or concrete dividers in the sky.
Sir, are you unfamiliar with the documentary film The Fifth Element?
#DeleteChrome
It's going to kill a cop or first responder in some completely moronic way soon ... don't own Tesla stock.
And how often does autopilot come across a physical object in the sky that wasn't there the last flight and then crash into it?
The only thing I can think of that's similar are bird strikes, but airplanes are NOT supposed to fall out of the sky over that and autopilot will crash into the bird. Also, pilots will crash into birds as well, you can't exactly avoid them. But that's ALL I can think of.
Except for other planes.
But guess what! Airplanes have autopilot systems that avoid collisions with other planes even without pilot input. Imagine that!
But there are mountains. And tall buildings.
"Autopilot" is a poor name for Tesla's driver-assist technology because most people associate the word autopilot with "totally autonomous" and aren't bothered by the nuances of the technology as applied to aircraft. To most folks, autopilot means exactly what it sounds like, and it's pretty clear that there are a number of Tesla drivers treating it as such.
The comparison to an aircraft's autopilot, while technically correct, is irrelevant to the discussion. A remarkably minuscule percentage of the human population will ever see a cockpit, let alone operate the controls. Autopilot means George Jetson era autopilot and that's that.
Beware of the Leopard.
You know, ones that worked on the safety systems in aerospace industry for the last several decades, using technologies that aren't cool in 21st century. Guess what you get with toddler engineers.
I bet if they would use the ol' guys just as consultants the number of catastrophic failures would be near 0. Just like it is in the aerospace when you ignore the human factor.
You can let a plane or a boat follow a heading and most of the time everything is fine. Autopilot simply keeps you from drifting off course due to winds or currents.
What Tesla is selling clearly isn't autopilot in anything like that sense. They're using 'autopilot' as a 'high tech' marketing term and letting people believe the car can do things it really can't. To make matters worst, Tesla is also letting 'drivers' not pay attention to what's going on for long periods of time, reinforcing the idea that the car do more than it really can. So as far as this specific crash is concerned, it likely wouldn't have happened if not for Tesla's negligence.
I would imagine most objects encountered in the sky weren't there the last time.
Since Musk can send an OtA update to adjust brake usage, he can send a command to disable auto pilot on all Teslas in the wild.
With that problem taken care of, he and his engineers can spend their time working on reworking and/or improving their "auto pilot" so it doesn't run into parked vehicles. Or anything else.
"Autopilot" is a poor name for Tesla's driver-assist technology because most people associate the word autopilot with "totally autonomous" and aren't bothered by the nuances of the technology as applied to aircraft. To most folks, autopilot means exactly what it sounds like, and it's pretty clear that there are a number of Tesla drivers treating it as such.
The comparison to an aircraft's autopilot, while technically correct, is irrelevant to the discussion. A remarkably minuscule percentage of the human population will ever see a cockpit, let alone operate the controls. Autopilot means George Jetson era autopilot and that's that.
Actually Autopilot is the perfect name for the technology, at least from a marketing perspective. It implies hands-off driving to those that haven't been trained to fly airplanes, i.e., just about everyone, and therefore drives sales. At the same time plausible deniability exists because there is some logical explanation that makes sense to some set of individuals.
Would Zedd have fallen asleep if his mind had been occupied by driving?
There's been plenty studies on aircraft autopilots to know that Tesla's Autopilot is the worst model when it comes to outcomes if the driver is suddenly needed, precisely because of problems like this.
Well, it's your own fault for not doing autopilot drugs.
I didnt realize pilots used autopilot to fly low through mountain valleys, which would be compatable to a highway.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
AND FLIGHT PLANS!!!! Does a Tesla require filing and following a FLIGHT PLAN?
No, you're confused. That was the Star Wars Holiday Special.
I don't blame you for feeling that way, however.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
And airplane autopilot has been a contributing factor in a number of airline crashes. However those are usually blamed on the human who failed to use them properly.
It's exactly autopilot in that sense. It follows a heading given by a GPS route. A plane or boat have many fewer obstacles , heading changes, and traffic to deal with than a car.
The problem seems to be a misunderstanding of what autopilot is in ANY mode of transport.
The B1B can do it, but it costs much more than a Tesla
Zedd's not dead.
aren't police cars considered police officers? a bit like dogs...
In auto-pilot or not the driver is responsible for what the car does since the Tesla Auto-Pilot is not a level 5 autonomous control unit. So far I've only seen statements from the Police to the press stating that the driver _said_ it was in auto-pilot. Either way, the driver drove into the back of the patrol car, end of story. But it is not so this is just more of the negative press machine against Tesla and nothing more. Could be funded by Delco-Remy or any of the other antique auto industry players.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
The feature is a car following, driver assist technology. It isn't designed to avoid stationary objects and it says so in the manual (according to a new article I read). There's been plenty of other automatic car stories so I'm not going to bother posting my opinion on the matter, I'm just stating a fact which most people overlook.
The solution to ignorance is education, not dumbing down the world to cater to the most ignorant among us.
Autopilot has a defined meaning, and that meaning is not "autonomous behavior which needs no human attention".
I bet the cop got pretty pissed when he figured out there was no one he could run in.
I think clearly people are misunderstanding the system and over confident in its abilities. The name Auto Pilot doesn't help matters and I think that was a mistake to market the system with that name. Although a airliner has a auto pilot system too, that many pilots use when cruising at altitude. Of course they don't have nearly the obstacles and hazards in the air as automobiles do. Even so a pilot would generally turn off auto pilot in any condition that would warrant more attentive control. Seems to me were asking cars auto pilot to do way more then auto pilot in aircraft?
Record producer Zedd also responded to the news by sharing a self-centered canard, saying, "I once fell asleep driving home late at night..." implying that Tesla's autopilot is a life saver.
His tweet is in no way connected to the latest Tesla Autopilot crash, he was merely attention whoring like most parasites upon society.
So what he's really saying there is, "I was driving once, I fell asleep because I was too stupid and self-centered to care about others safety or my own, and the Tesla saved me from my stupidity".
You just gotta love our media, using that inane quote as a critical headline, fucking idiots.
Of course, those all take a deliberate pilot intervention. The teslas autonomously changed course to hit a parked car. Aircraft surplus have well vetted, certified, deterministic logic. The teslas doesn't.
You are ignoring Tesla's own claims.
"Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars. All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver"
See? Claim as understood by normal reasonable person is that the thing is superior to humans in driving a car.
Oh? that's not true? they lied and exaggerated with marketing hype? Oh noes!
Considering the training that humans have to go though before they get to a point where they would use an aircraft autopilot, not unreasonable at all.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
so you know what to expect from the system.
How many tesla driver completly rely on ap? Not beeing ready to react? Yes, It's stupid to do so, but maybe 50% of them already have had a crash - we won't see those numbers from Elon.
The autopilot in a plane also requires all pilots to be trained and aware of not just its abilities but also its well defined limitations. Are you suggesting Tesla drivers should all require a separate training and certification process to be able to use autopilot?
Tesla responded in a statement, "and before a driver can use Autopilot, they must accept a dialogue box which states that 'Autopilot is designed for use on highways that have a center divider and clear lane markings.'"
If only the vehicle had some kind of fancy GPS + Computer Vision system that could detect when it was being used in a situation for which it was not designed and either refuse to work, or at least give the user a stern warning.
I once fell asleep driving home late at night on the highway (w/ autopilot on) and got woken up by it beeping + turning off music to wake me up. Would have prob been dead without it... I didn't touch the steering wheel for a couple minutes and then it turned off the music and started beeping.
Possibly, it's also possible that he fell asleep because the Tesla was doing the driving for him.
It should also be noted how ridiculously lucky he is that he wasn't killed when the Tesla woke him up and put his confused half-asleep self back in control of the vehicle. Another Tesla driver was already killed by that exact scenario.
I stole this Sig
Indeed, the Telsa "Autopilot" is an order of magnitude more intelligent than a normal plane AutoPilot. And both can kill for the same reason.
There have been a number of crashes like the Air Asian one at SFO where pilots have set AutoPilot (actually AutoThrottle for nit pickers) to the wrong mode. The pilots then do not monitor basic things like air speed. Until the plane falls out of the sky. The would be probably better off with no Auto anything.
Fix that whole "can't avoid running into stationary objects" thing already. That's the most basic requirement for non-stationary objects with any form of steering.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
News flash, idiot- most people are not pilots.
It is not about the name. People fully understand what it can do and what they should do. But as Google noticed already 10 years ago, no matter what you tell to the people, they will not obey. This is why Google aims to create cars without steering wheel. You simply can't trust people.
Requiem for the American Dream
A pilot has how many years of education and practice for flying specific aircrafts?
A car in traffic need how many ms of reaction time and defensive driving skills to be proactive in unclear situations?
There's just no comparison. So calling it autopilot is downright stupid, and dangerous. Pilots are nothing like average, so now everyone is expected to be like pilots?
Stop falling in love with your own logical fallacies like a religious junkie, start questioning yourself and open your eyes to more than one perspective.
Which completely fails -- yet again -- to answer the most important question:
WAS THE DRIVER PAYING ATTENTION OR NOT?!?!?!
But who in the living fuck cares about that, right? Keep fueling that fire. Everyone be afraid of Tesla vehicles, they're going to kill all of you. Buy a Ford. Burn more gas. Be a good American.
The evidence of what many of us have believed is finally coming out. This technology isn't what it was promised to be and can't replace humans behind the wheel. The evidence points to the fact, because the technology isn't smart enough you still need a human in the seat monitoring what the car is doing, so the human can take over instantly when the system meets a situation where it finally decides it doesn't know what to do. This was proven in NTSA's crash analysis of the Phoenix fatality where the system finally called for driver control with less than two seconds before the crash. So, if we need a human to constantly monitor the system, what benefit does the system really provide: a false sense of security???
ezbatteryreconditioninginfo.org
But.. but.. as other post pointed out, airplane pilots are highly super duper intelligent.
Why did you put 'a physical object in the sky' as boundary? How about bad weather? how about physical object that's not in the sky (e.g. mountain)? How about sensor failure?
The answer for this question: there are many fatal accidents involving autopilot in airplane.
The autopilot in a plane also requires all pilots to be trained and aware of not just its abilities but also its well defined limitations. Are you suggesting Tesla drivers should all require a separate training and certification process to be able to use autopilot?
It is called a drivers license.
Not just Tesla drivers should have one.
It is simply astounding to me how many people are willing to show up on message boards and empathically declare and take the position that is perfectly OK and a statutory right for drivers to operate dangerous vehicles without knowing what they are doing. Yet here we are.
I would bet money that each and every Tesla driver that has wrecked their car has had it told to them both verbally and in writing about the limitations of the "Autopilot" feature. I would be surprised if Tesla even allows them to take delivery of the car without getting the customer to sign off on it. (Maybe they do I haven't checked -- can someone confirm?)
Question: I have a Jeep that was sold as an "All Terrain Vehicle." Well a cliff is "terrain" isn't it? If I drive my Jeep off a cliff what would you think about a lawsuit suing the manufacturer because the LIED about its capability?
Oh yeah, there's lot of those at 35,000 feet.
The Tesla Autopilot doesn't follow a GPS route. If it did, it wouldn't have crashed into a concrete divider.
That's the same slimy reasoning that Musk used after the wreck where the Tesla drove straight into a semi.
Here's the problem: the 1 in 86 million mile bit is for "vehicles". "Vehicles", Including things like motorcycles and bicycles.
So until Tesla starts "Autopiloting" those, comparing the fatality rate of expensive luxury sedans to a rate that includes people on $100 Walmart bikes without helmets seems like some serious bullshit.
Tornados (and cruise missiles) do.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Again and again, Wiley Coyote gets fooled when the Roadunner paints white stripes leading to a cliff on which he paints the entrance to a tunnel. Can Tesla autopilot pass the Roadrunner test? I think not. "Tesla Autopilot" needs to be renamed "Tesla Wiley Coyote."
This is a known characteristic of the Tesla "autopilot". I wouldn't even call it a "defect" per se as it is simply operating as it is designed to work.
It won't pick up stationary objects, particularly if there is another vehicle in front of the autopilot vehicle, going about the same speed, and then that vehicles move aside with the stationary object right in the middle of the lane.
This is one reason of many why the Tesla system requires constant supervision by the human driver.
Of course the reason the whole type of system is a really bad idea is because it works great 99.9% of the time. Thus lulling the human driver into a false sense of security and safety. So then the human driver tunes out. Then 2000 miles later (or whatever) the "Autopilot" encounters a situation it can't handle and you wham into the back of a firetruck or whatever.
And no, I'm not making this up:
https://www.wired.com/story/te...
http://www.newsweek.com/tesla-...
https://www.teslarati.com/tesl...
I saw where you can use two oranges stuck in the steering wheel so you don't have to use your hands. Fun City!
The day drivers face licensing requirements, costs and restrictions that are anything like aviation pilots, you'll have a point. Right now, not so much.
My GPS once insisted I drive into a car full of longhorn cattle, so I am pretty sure it could tell me to drive through something concrete too. Note, I didn't drive into the field.
I just hope the car isn't black.
I'm with Google's approach to self-driving cars. Until they're good enough that I can safely take a nap in the back seat without my attention and Google will claim full responsibility in the event of an accident, I'm not trusting a half-implemented system. Humans aren't good at long stretches of nothingness followed by emergency split second reaction. It's not how we're built to react to things and to try to do so is asking for trouble.
You can't tell me that these people who all have been through the Tesla paperwork, and I'm sure have all been aware about all of the attention these accidents get, could possibly NOT know they're doing stupid things when they crash. So far there has been ZERO reports of someone using autopilot as they have been instructed to do, who has gotten into an accident. In every single one of those cases despite the driver's claims, there are multiple cases of them being caught driving unsafely with these turned on. The first popularized case involved a man who made videos sitting in the back seat, and was watching Harry Potter when he crashed. The recent case in Europe had a man who admitted to falling asleep at the wheel many times and being woken up by the car ON THAT SAME TRIP.
No matter what the general masses think about it is irrelevant. The people who have bought these cars had to go through lots of red tape to turn it on, and had lots of warnings from Tesla. This is on top of all of the news about people having wrecks doing the exact same thing. This is not a case of the autopilot being so poor it wrecks. It works so well, so often, that people grow too comfortable with it and ignore warnings.
You own a Jeep....you were screwed to begin with.
Claiming that only 'stupid' people misuse 'autopilot' doesn't reduce Tesla's responsibilities.
Their marketing facilitates the idea that's it's normal to let 'autopilot' steer their car, and the fact that Tesla doesn't sound an alarm or prompt the driver to hold the steering wheel for long periods of time emphasizes Tesla major responsibility in these types of crashes.
"It's exactly autopilot in that sense."
Autopilot was invented because when cruising with locked controls, boats and planes would still slowly drift of course, but the idea of cruising in a car with locked controls doesn't make sense, and adding autopilot to that even less.
The police cruiser was empty of officers at the time of the crash.
Is this implying that it would have been OK if there were people that were not officers inside the cruiser?