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Online Videos Shame Two Sleeping Tesla Drivers (jalopnik.com)
Electrek reports:
A Tesla Model S driver in Southern California was caught on camera seemingly asleep at the wheel while driving on Autopilot... Kevin Paschal from Southern California shared the video on Facebook and said about the incident: "Highlight of my day. Dude is passed out on the freeway in his Tesla and still driving better than 90% of SoCal, lol... Dude was perfectly centered in his lane the whole time and maintained a safe distance from all vehicles...."
In this case, it looks like the driver has at least one hand over the bottom half of the steering wheel, which could be enough to avoid any Autopilot alert -- thought that's not always the case. Paschal said that the driver was like that for "several miles" and when asked why he didn't honk to attempt to wake him or get him to pay attention, he wrote, "I'm not sure the car would have cared...."
You should definitely attempt to wake the driver up if it can be done safely. As for the driver falling asleep, there are basically two schools of thoughts here. One could say that the driver would have fallen asleep anyway, as drivers do, and Autopilot actually made the situation a lot safer. Others would argue that the convenience aspect of Tesla's Autopilot might have actually contributed to putting the driver to sleep.
BGR also reports on a second incident where "If anything, the Tesla driver in the video is so relaxed that he's not even at the wheel; he's full-on reclining."
"This is why I personally think Level 2 autonomy is a bad idea," warns Jalopnik. "If it's possible for a moron like this to sleep while the car is driving at highway speeds, that's a huge problem."
In this case, it looks like the driver has at least one hand over the bottom half of the steering wheel, which could be enough to avoid any Autopilot alert -- thought that's not always the case. Paschal said that the driver was like that for "several miles" and when asked why he didn't honk to attempt to wake him or get him to pay attention, he wrote, "I'm not sure the car would have cared...."
You should definitely attempt to wake the driver up if it can be done safely. As for the driver falling asleep, there are basically two schools of thoughts here. One could say that the driver would have fallen asleep anyway, as drivers do, and Autopilot actually made the situation a lot safer. Others would argue that the convenience aspect of Tesla's Autopilot might have actually contributed to putting the driver to sleep.
BGR also reports on a second incident where "If anything, the Tesla driver in the video is so relaxed that he's not even at the wheel; he's full-on reclining."
"This is why I personally think Level 2 autonomy is a bad idea," warns Jalopnik. "If it's possible for a moron like this to sleep while the car is driving at highway speeds, that's a huge problem."
I feel like autopilot will be really good for elderly people who refuse to stop driving. Having my grandparents (and now, my dad) drive the car made a trip scarier than any rollercoaster.
asleep at the wheel would be an improvement on governance
I call it sleeping
Better that than dozing off without autopilot.
This is the fact that the populist human first sceptics should admit to. Given that, these sorts of stories aren't a problem; as the quote admits, the car was driving safely.
I've enjoyed a few martinis on my way to work in my Model S.
I think that you should either be paying attention to the road, or not be driving. The latter, these days, might include a self-driving car. So if the thing notices you're asleep and takes over, I'm actually fine with that, as long as the thing is qualified for the environment.
The question is, is an aircraft-style autopilot enough? In cities, certainly not. Other roads, probably not. On the freeway, if the thing can just keep lane and away from obstacles (other cars, accidents, ...), it might be. For verily, what might a (not-so-terribly) alert driver do that a distance-and-lane-keeping autopilot cannot, in cases of calamity?
...the sleep of the just or the just asleep? - Douglas Adams (paraphrasing)
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Here is a video of sleeping drivers shamed in their car without automatic braking:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Obviously the solution here is automatic fuel injection. And by fuel, I mean caffeine; and by injection, I mean hypodermic.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Isn’t the technology supposed to detect that a driver is "non-responsive" and bring the car to a halt in a controlled manner? Those idiots should not be seen cruising around; they should be parked at the right side, call for emergency already sent (they’d then have to pay for their "nap").
This is Tesla’s fault. Either they have no such detection or it’s broken (deactivation being a fault).
Get in front of him, lift your foot off the gas pedal, and slow down to the minimum speed for the highway. Distance control will slow him and alert him to wake up, no? AND make sure you don't videotape the whole thing and post it to FB.
Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
Sorry, but this looks like the video is scripted and setup. There's a lot of people trying to kill tesla off because of the threat it represents to the 'established norm' for vehicle manufacturer, and that's upsetting for the people that stand to lose the most.
I expect to see a lot of these setup videos.
It'll be VERY interesting for the people involved to be investigated (Those taking the video, and their relationships to the people being filmed), and of course, their bank accounts.
It bound to happen when you put a half ready autopilot in a car that's very good and expect human to sit and watch it drive correctly all the time. After a month your going to be on your phone or doing something else.
Sleeping is putting a lot of trust in it however.
If the car didn't have autopilot and he fell asleep, and crashed into another car at highway speed killing five people, then it wouldn't even make local news. Novel things make the news, and car accidents are routine - no-one cares about that continuous death toll any more, it's become background noise. But Tesla autopilot? That's new! Exciting! Scary! That gets covered.
Your work is not very hard. You will be replaced by robots. TBH I have always been able to code after a long night at the pub, in fact I used to deliberately reserve doing 'the boring bits' to when I was drunk. I must admit that writing code seems to me like carpentry. So long as the bookshelves stay up who gives a fuck about the exact design or workmanship?
In my real work none of this applies, but coding, tis a laborer's job, not a profession.
Highway speeds, then the highways need to be PERFECTLY MARKED AND MAINTAINED. None of this multi-month crap of road sections grated up or left without lane markers. No lane markers that make weird sudden shifts. No intersections that don't follow the rules.
Currently we have all these things. I know from personal experience it
is the questionably maintained patches of road that introduced danger
into my driving experience. Either eroded so much that it didn't provide
traction for braking, or so unmarked it became difficult to space my
lane compared to the expected number of lanes (sometimes even in areas
that merged or split into fewer or more lanes!
Once the roads are of adequate reliability most concerns with autopilot
go away, outside of pedestrians/animals in the road (issue with humans
too), and major changes to the road or vehicles that software cannot
account for (also a problem with people. Try working out the tail lights
on some of the new cars and what lane they are in, particularly hondas
and new priuses.)
On well designed, safe highways It can be very boring to drive at low speed limits like 55MPH or 100KPH. I feel more alert when I drive with the flow of traffic which is often 20% higher than posted limits in the eastern USA. When the job is too boring it's hard for humans to maintain alertness and vigilance.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Then it will be like a train or plane, nobody will be able to fall asleep anyway and you can call it a "public transportation system" then everything will be ok with society.
Someone might do an expose on the epidemic of sleep deprivation in America which is the problem glossed over in these kind of stories. Why are people sleeping behind the wheel in the first place? Never mind the technological solutions that treat the symptom.
In the early days of electric and diesel trains, the drivers had a propensity to doze off. To avoid this they had to keep pressure on a handle to keep the brakes from being applied. In more recent years this feature appears to have faded from trains, but might be worth considering for cars. The other solution offered in trains is a system that triggers an alarm every couple of minutes which must be manually switched off or, again, the brakes will be applied. Again some variation for cars might be possible.
Perversely of course train driving could easily be full automated today, at least for good trains, given that signal data is fed directly to the cab.
You end up with morons driving.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
is the natural progression and it should be the objective.
in my sleep, like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror like his passengers.
"it looks like the driver has at least one hand over the bottom half of the steering wheel,"
A couple of Wiener sausages will do the job quite nicely.
If grandpa is dangerous then he should lose his license. Yearly driving tests plus automatic retest for any moving violation.
Putting gramps in a level 2 vehicle is not the answer.
Did you report him to the dmv? No? Why the fuck not? You waiting until after he kills himself and a bunch of innocent people?
You have a responsibility to him and everyone else to get him off the road if he is dangerous.
"This is why I personally think Level 2 autonomy is a bad idea," warns Jalopnik. "If it's possible for a moron like this to sleep while the car is driving at highway speeds, that's a huge problem."
Last spring a semi-trailer driver fell asleep on the 401 eastbound just up the road from my house (about 1.5 km away). As a result of some night-time construction, there was a traffic jam, and the truck piled into it at full speed and killed several people. The resulting accident study and cleanup left the entire highway, the business in North America or the world depending on who you ask, blocked for the majority of a day.
Level 2 autonomy should be legally mandated on all cars. If we can't stop people from falling asleep at the wheel, we should at least stop that from killing people.
I remember a story I heard many years ago. There was a couple who on the advent of their retirement had emigrated to the U.S. from some european country (I'm tempted to say 'Poland' but I could be wrong). They bought an RV with the intent to tour the United States in it. The RV had Cruise Control; now, mind you, this story is set (I believe) back in the 1970's, so 'cruise control' meant a mechanism that kept the vehicle at a set speed and that's all. They apparently had never heard of such a thing and for whatever reasons believed that meant it could control the entire vehicle, so they got up on the freeway, set the cruise control, and then just went into the back. Luck being the fickle thing it is sometimes they managed to not get killed when the RV crashed, but the point of the story is they believed the capabilities of the technology was far ahead of what it actually was. So it goes with so-called 'AI' and so-called 'self driving car' technology; really, neither one is very good at all, but is hyped up so much, using language that misleads people into believing it's as capable as a human driver, when it's really not and may never be. For the average person even warning them not to trust it is ineffective, them believing that they're being warned merely for liability control purposes. Thus you have incidents like in the featured article. More and more incidents like this will occur, but without such benign results, as auto manufacturers continue to push SDCs on the public in a mad dash to make back the money they invested in their development, even though they're not really good enough for public roads but will fool people into believing they can really be trusted with their lives. Better be ready for bad times to come as people die needlessly due to SDCs.
I find it quite telling that no one here has thought that maybe the sleeping morons don't deserve the privilege of operating a deadly weapon on public roads. Someone gave these morons "licenses" to drive, indicating that at some point they had to take some "tests" as to their abilities to handle such an undertaking. Perhaps the problem is not with them sleeping but with the system that gives incompetent morons drivers' licenses.
When my father lost his license, he didn't stop driving. And it was impossible to convince him (Altzheimer's). Hiding the keys only worked until he found a set.
A few years after that he was finally hospitalized, but it should have happened earlier. I still remember him trying to seduce my wife in front of my mother (his wife). He'd gotten so that he couldn't stand up, but he couldn't remember that. He still thought he was a good driver.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I heard this story before but it was a bunch of hippies. They bought a van with cruse control. Lead hippie pointed the van to the open highway, hit cruse control, and went to back of the van to hit the bong with his friends.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Call in a license plate and if it's registered the car stops or pulls over. Get a picture of a person behind the wheel and they can't enable the system for six months.
When my father lost his license, he didn't stop driving. And it was impossible to convince him (Altzheimer's). Hiding the keys only worked until he found a set.
Yeah why bother with having laws, people can just break them.
I've fallen asleep at the wheel twice, once resulting in a serious crash and the other a fender bender. Any autonomy, even a stopgap AI like we have now, would be an improvement for me. I want it as a backup system in the hope that between the two of us we might make one decent driver.
You end up with morons driving.
You've always had with morons driving, since the very first transportation systems. Except in ye-olden-days, the vehicle (horse) came with in-built collision avoidance and self-preservation instincts. It was probably smarter than a lot of the drivers too. Cars are only just beginning to catch up with horses.
"Hiding the keys only worked until he found a set."
Been there with my mom, who, until just last year lived alone and is now in a nursing home. She would go so far as to agree that she shouldn't be driving anymore, and I taught her how to use Uber. When I heard from a neighbor that she'd had a fall in the driveway next to the car that was kept in her garage, I knew she wasn't being truthful with us. At that point, I pulled a couple fuses, essentially disabling her vehicle.
Just another day in Paradise
Just wait until someone dies of a heart attack or stroke while on the road and shows up safely at their destination stone dead behind the wheel. . .