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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!"
At least it stopped automatically for the cops.
What percentage of humans did these things versus percentage of autopilots?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
There are presumably a lot more Fords on the road than Teslas.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"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.
First there was cruise control. It maintained speed.
Then there was adaptive cruise control. It maintained speed and distance from the car in front.
Now there's autopilot. It maintains speed, distance from the car in front, follows lanes and assists with overtaking.
At no stage did anyone say you could take your focus off the road with any of them. And there's no need to revert to older technology because some people are stupid.
How many humans crashed into parked cars on Tuesday?
How many human drivers safety passed that cop car without ramming into it?
"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.
On the contrary. If there are enough people who cannot understand how to use a technology, it should be held up. You can fix that by educating them, not by getting them to agree to disclaimers and then blaming them.
Some people will obviously misuse technology. But if the number misusing is high enough, there is either a problem with the technology, or how it is being marketed/explained to people.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
As the summary points out, there are likely people being saved by autopilot like Zedd, but they don't make the news.
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.
Since when do you need to hold the "steering wheel" in a plane that's on autopilot?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
You clearly don't know anything about how autopilots work on planes. The autopilot in most airplanes will make no attempt at all to avoid obstacles. You tell it where to go and depending on how sophisticated the autopilot is, you may be able to specify the altitude and climb and descent rates. In some cases they can track satellite or ground based navigation systems. If I tell my autopilot to descend to 500 feet and point it at a mountain, my airplane will crash into that mountain. You have to tell it exactly what to do. Some airplane autopilots can only maintain a specific heading and don't even maintain altitude for you. If there is a crosswind you have to adjust the autopilot to stay on the correct course. Very few airplanes have autopilots that can handle all phases of flight. In most cases you have to take off and land yourself. Autopilot does not mean that the airplane intelligently flies itself to your destination.
All the people complaining about the name "Autopilot" being misleading have one thing in common: They don't own or drive Teslas.
Tesla makes it extremely clear, when you buy the car, and every time you drive it, that Autopilot doesn't fully control the car, and the driver needs to stay alert and be ready to take control at any time.
There are plenty of problems with Autopilot, but being "misleading" is not one of them.
Really? A Ford killed somebody today, by itself? I doubt that; that results in investigations and recalls.
If Tesla requires the person behind the wheel (not the "driver", since they're relying on the car to do that) to accept a message that says the so-called Autopilot software is only designed for certain situations, why is the software driving in other situations? My car has lane-keeping and adaptive cruise control, but when I go outside their design ranges, they beep at me and disable.
Teslas have driven over 7,2 billion miles. Given how by far most of that has been accumulated since the addition of AP hardware (in October 2016 they were only at 3,5B), and from the Q1 conference call we know that over 1/3 of Tesla miles are on AP, we can extrapolate to maybe around 2 billion miles (give or take large margins of error, and yes, that's the best we can do for now until the first AP statistics report comes out). At the normal US vehicle fatality rate of 1 per 86 million miles driven, 23 people should have died on AP (were Teslas only of average-safety, which they're not).
Adjust up or down by your personal assumptions. We should have actual data to work with in a month or two.
Jesus: "Son of a